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YouTube is faster on Firefox on my laptop for some reason. I get zero dropped frames on Firefox too, compared to Chrome/Chromium. Still waiting on Firefox to s

YouTube is faster on Firefox on my laptop for some reason. I get zero dropped frames on Firefox too, compared to Chrome/Chromium. Still waiting on Firefox to support hardware-accelerated decoding of videos though.

mehrdadn 7y ago
> Still waiting on Firefox to support hardware-accelerated decoding of videos though. Wait, Firefox doesn't do this already? Didn't know.
- pitaj 7y ago
  I'm fairly certain it does it already.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    It says its using the GPU but if you look at the cpu time required to play a 1080p video within firefox vs playing the same video with mpv www.mpv.io : a lightweight player that among other things can transparently stream any url understood by youtube-dl It uses 20x as much cpu as mpv. For purposes of comparison this is like Toyota selling a car that goes just as fast as your Ford so long as you are OK with only getting 4MPG. There is an addon if you prefer to right click on a url and open in mpv or in an addon like Tridactyl you can do the same with your keyboard. It also lets you speed up and slow down the playback speed which is nice for speakers who talk too slow and take a while to get to the point.
    - cmcaine 7y ago
      I use mpv on my laptop to get more out of the battery and to stop the fan annoying me.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    It uses the GPU but doesn't use it to actually decode video on linux. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726 Bug opened 4 years ago. Hundreds of millions in revenue and can't task one person for a summer to hook into the support that already exists.
    - leeoniya 7y ago
      > Hundreds of millions in revenue and probably < 0.5% of it due to its linux userbase?
      - vetinari 7y ago
        It's not that they have huge userbase lately, so they could afford to lose it any further.
        JohnBooty 7y ago
        What would you consider a huge userbase? Firefox has 230 million monthly users, using FF for an average of over 5 hours per day. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
        vetinari 7y ago
        Given that Linux has 2% desktop market share (let's be generous) and Firefox has 10% (let's be generous the same way), that would mean that Linux has potential to be 20% of Firefox users. Is that something you are going to ignore? Many executives would sell their families for less opportunity.
        pjmlp 7y ago
        The big difference is that those executives would be getting money out of those 20% customer base. I seriously doubt that those 20% Firefox users even consider doing a $1 donation.
- MrRadar 7y ago
  It does on Windows and Mac. On Linux it does not but hopefully WebRender should pave the way to enabling it (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726).
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - jorvi 7y ago
    Something is still extremely funky with video on macOS Firefox. Playing MP4s on YouTube still uses 200-400% more power than on Safari, and that's with transparent window disabled. Hell, Twitch turns my 2015 MBP into a vacuum cleaner but Safari barely breaks a sweat.
    - MrRadar 7y ago
      Have you tried using a Nightly build of Firefox? There's recently been some work to use CoreAnimation on MacOS to reduce power consumption that hasn't made it to the Beta or Release channels yet. (See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522)
      - jiripospisil 7y ago
        There's also [0] which investigates streamed video including YouTube specifically. While for all major platforms even including Windows on ARM64 the performance is good for VP9, and somewhat degraded for high resolution H264 videos, the results for Mac are bad across all of them. It's not even possible to playback videos with a 480p resolution, without being affected by a lot of framedrops. In those 15s of playback a 480p VP9 video produces around 5 dropped frames, a 720p and 1080p video already ~45 dropped frames. Really worse it is with 4k@60fps videos which have more than 400 dropped frames even with a playback speed of 1.0x! [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1576107 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1576107
- patrickmcnamara 7y ago
  Forgot to mention that I use GNU/Linux. My bad.

mehrdadn 7y ago

> Still waiting on Firefox to support hardware-accelerated decoding of videos though. Wait, Firefox doesn't do this already? Didn't know.

pitaj 7y ago
I'm fairly certain it does it already.
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  It says its using the GPU but if you look at the cpu time required to play a 1080p video within firefox vs playing the same video with mpv www.mpv.io : a lightweight player that among other things can transparently stream any url understood by youtube-dl It uses 20x as much cpu as mpv. For purposes of comparison this is like Toyota selling a car that goes just as fast as your Ford so long as you are OK with only getting 4MPG. There is an addon if you prefer to right click on a url and open in mpv or in an addon like Tridactyl you can do the same with your keyboard. It also lets you speed up and slow down the playback speed which is nice for speakers who talk too slow and take a while to get to the point.
  - cmcaine 7y ago
    I use mpv on my laptop to get more out of the battery and to stop the fan annoying me.
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  It uses the GPU but doesn't use it to actually decode video on linux. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726 Bug opened 4 years ago. Hundreds of millions in revenue and can't task one person for a summer to hook into the support that already exists.
  - leeoniya 7y ago
    > Hundreds of millions in revenue and probably < 0.5% of it due to its linux userbase?
    - vetinari 7y ago
      It's not that they have huge userbase lately, so they could afford to lose it any further.
      - JohnBooty 7y ago
        What would you consider a huge userbase? Firefox has 230 million monthly users, using FF for an average of over 5 hours per day. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
        vetinari 7y ago
        Given that Linux has 2% desktop market share (let's be generous) and Firefox has 10% (let's be generous the same way), that would mean that Linux has potential to be 20% of Firefox users. Is that something you are going to ignore? Many executives would sell their families for less opportunity.
        pjmlp 7y ago
        The big difference is that those executives would be getting money out of those 20% customer base. I seriously doubt that those 20% Firefox users even consider doing a $1 donation.
MrRadar 7y ago
It does on Windows and Mac. On Linux it does not but hopefully WebRender should pave the way to enabling it (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jorvi 7y ago
  Something is still extremely funky with video on macOS Firefox. Playing MP4s on YouTube still uses 200-400% more power than on Safari, and that's with transparent window disabled. Hell, Twitch turns my 2015 MBP into a vacuum cleaner but Safari barely breaks a sweat.
  - MrRadar 7y ago
    Have you tried using a Nightly build of Firefox? There's recently been some work to use CoreAnimation on MacOS to reduce power consumption that hasn't made it to the Beta or Release channels yet. (See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522)
    - jiripospisil 7y ago
      There's also [0] which investigates streamed video including YouTube specifically. While for all major platforms even including Windows on ARM64 the performance is good for VP9, and somewhat degraded for high resolution H264 videos, the results for Mac are bad across all of them. It's not even possible to playback videos with a 480p resolution, without being affected by a lot of framedrops. In those 15s of playback a 480p VP9 video produces around 5 dropped frames, a 720p and 1080p video already ~45 dropped frames. Really worse it is with 4k@60fps videos which have more than 400 dropped frames even with a playback speed of 1.0x! [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1576107 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1576107
patrickmcnamara 7y ago
Forgot to mention that I use GNU/Linux. My bad.