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What Firefox really needs is a little icon (preferably displayed prominently in the toolbar) that appears when videos are not being decoded in hardware. I'm sur
by jml7c5 6y ago
What Firefox really needs is a little icon (preferably displayed prominently in the toolbar) that appears when videos are not being decoded in hardware. I'm sure they've lost users who just think Firefox is "super laggy with YouTube" or that "Firefox really eats battery". An indication that something is wrong and the browser knows about it prevents the assumption that the browser is just buggy/slow/etc; the word-of-mouth changes from "Firefox sucks" to "Firefox told me it couldn't hardware accelerate my videos or something?" Still not positive, but potential users will hear that Firefox might not work with their hardware, rather than that Firefox is buggy, slow, and unreliable.
And I know technical users would appreciate it. I still don't know what is and isn't getting hardware video decode, or whether I actually need a particular about:config flag or system package, and I have tried hard to figure out.
- jmisavage 6y agoYou can go icon blind pretty easily. That being said I know my computer doesn't have VP8/9 hardware support so I installed the h264ify plugin for Firefox so YouTube serves me H.264 videos instead. Maybe Mozilla needs to detect hardware support and offer to install plugins like that or give a setup screen (newer video formats with more features vs old video formats with better battery/less fans)
- stefan_ 6y agoThe default assumption today and in the past on Linux is that there is zero hardware accelerated video display in any browser.
- pjmlp 6y agoWhich is why macOS, Windows and ChromeOS are the platforms for anyone who care about video hardware acceleration without messing with configurations.
- diamondlovesyou 6y agoChromeOS is Linux.
- klardotsh 6y agoI mean, sure, at a kernel level. It has its own GUI rendering stack (Freon) rather than the usual X11/Wayland of "normal" Linux, and it's Freon that has their acceleration support.
- pjmlp 6y agoNot really, it is an implementation detail not exposed to users. Even Crostini relies on containers and virtualization to expose a second kernel, WSL2 style.
- andrewmackrodt 6y agoI have a GTX 1080 which performs wonderfully under Linux (Ubuntu) but I still have to go into Firefox and Chrome browser flags to force hardware accelerated GPU rendering on. Once that's enabled they work as well as Windows. New users may benefit if browsers prompted users to try forcing hardware acceleration and have the ability to easily disable it, or do so automatically if it detects crashes, e.g. where location, microphone and video settings can be toggled.
- fulafel 6y agoNitpick: Browsers on Linux have been using hardware video display acceleration since the Netscape 0.9 / Mosaic days, but video codec acceleration has been spotty.