Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, respectively first and third most-used browser, were recently updated and included support for the FLAC audio format playback. This means that it will now be possible to stream FLAC files and that it will be possible to provide better audio in videos, too.
You will need to make sure Mozilla Firefox 51 and Google Chrome 56 are installed for FLAC playback. No action is required from the user, as support is baked in and is automatically activated once you update the browser. Playback is possible not only for standalone, downloadable files, but for HTML5 streams, too.
The downside is that no major service beside Tidal currently offers FLAC streaming and that bandwidth requirements are often vastly superior to lossy streaming (i.e. AAC or MP3), even though FLAC 1.3.2 improves compression. What services would add FLAC streaming remains to be seen. The infrastructure is there, though, so we may see changes in the future.
You can have a look at Mozilla Firefox’s release notes and to Google Chrome’s bug tracker to learn more details about the matter.
