It is slower not due to drivers, but due to how the browsers[1] compose the final webpage. It does that using CPU, not GPU as on other operating systems, so har

It is slower not due to drivers, but due to how the browsers[1] compose the final webpage. It does that using CPU, not GPU as on other operating systems, so hardware video decoding would involve moving the compressed video to GPU, waiting for it to decode, moving the decoded video back to RAM, do the composition, and then move the result back to GPU for display. For hw decoding to have sense, GPU composition is needed. Hopefully webrender will bring that in for Linux too. [1] Firefox actually, Chrome does use GPU composition. Chrome for ChromeOS even uses the same driver (libva+intel-vaapi-driver) as desktop linux for video decoding, Google just is not willing to support it on desktop. That's what some distributions enable in their Chromium builds.