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Comment by chao- | Hacker News Reader

I have the opposite experience with YouTube.

With an AMD GPU on Linux, Chrome churns, drops frames, and stutters horribly on even 1080p videos at 30fps. Firefox, meanwhile, handles 1440p60 video with no problem. Even two such videos simultaneously, on separate monitors.

Chrome became inexplicably better for parts of early 2019 (I did not note which versions), but starting 2 or 3 months ago Chrome returned to being unusable for YouTube beyond 720p videos.

Before anyone asks, this is on an AMD RX 580 with Mesa 18.0.

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Hey, I'm on the chromium videostack team, would you mind filing a bug report for what you see happening with youtube? https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/entry

Well, if you're willing to investigate, using ungoogled chromium resulted in tremendous gains while using youtube to the point where I can speed up a video to 2x without the fan ever running amok against my ears.

I will take a look this weekend and if I can properly explain and document the issue in detail, I will definitely give you everything I can.

I should add that for an identical Linux distro-and-version, and identical browser versions, my laptop (I forget the SKU, but Intel Broadwell U-series GPU) is about equal in performance between Chrome and Firefox. That is to say, 1440p60 runs smooth on each, so they're good enough that there's no issue from which to discern a difference (which is damned impressive for a 4-year old mobile chip, imo).

Fixing this would be like eight steps forward: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137247

The annoying part is that hardware acceleration works on chrome OS, so we know the support is buried in there somewhere.

Google closed that as Won't Fix, they are very opinionated and steadfast in their opinion as an organization.

I doubt they will take Linux outside their own walled gardens seruously, Google has already shown their indifference to us Linux users.

They opened it as Won't Fix, which appears to be their way of saying that they'll accept work but it has a priority of less than zero.

Asking to do the work of raising a bug to make a product better which is competing with other non profit product is in itself a bit arrogant in my opinion. On top of that the attitude to be lazy to search for the issue which was already marked as won't fix https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137247 is not the right thing to do. I would have appreciated if you have created the issue with the details provided and shared the link her for the op to fill in more details.

When chrome slows down for me, it normally means I need to run clear browsing history, delete cookies, cache, logins, etc. I have modern hardware, on both linux/windows same issue.

But using res on reddit and click "show images" you can tell chrome isn't as fast as other browsers, firefox/brave are visually faster/smoother in scrolling with pics. Hell, even firefox focus is faster on android. But I like chrome addons and sync with my mobile, its my daily driver. Normally I never notice, but a quick clean if starts acting out fixes it for me.

Sync with my mobile and all the other devices (4 other computers) is one reason why I use Firefox. It's because it's the only browser, as far as I know, which lets me run my own sync server and offers a open source implementation of it.

https://jeena.net/firefox-sync-15

Oh neat, when they first switched to sync that wasn't the case (the previous system did allow it over WebDAV and such), but because sync wasn't just a data dump with WebDAV it wasn't possible at launch to run your own server. I'll have to look into that again.

As far back as I remember the code behind sync was on GitHub and I do mean the backend. It probably still is. But I let Mozilla host it cause they encrypt it. If I lose my password I lose my synched items.

Nothing stressed me out more than the time I genuinely forgot my FF password for a few days!

If it's for a few days, how did you un-forget?

It was there I think, but wasn't immediately possible to use a different server as they hadn't enabled or built that into the browser yet. They were still working out issues and I never bothered to check up on it because it seemed like the encryption was secure enough for me.

Hey, I remember the time when Chrome was soooo fast and we needed to clean up all the stuff to get Firefox to run adequately :)

have you double checked whether firefox is set to use your gpu or not, for video?

Neither Firefox nor Chrome under Linux are capable of using GPU for video decoding.

Only some distribution-specific Chromium builds do.

I seem to remember that some GPU acceleration under Linux was disabled voluntarily, on both Firefox and Chrome, because they actually ran much slower than CPU, probably due to bad drivers.

That’s certain GPU acceleration of rendering - specifically for Firefox I think compositing is disabled by default. It’s not the same as GPU accelerated video decoding which isn’t implemented in either browser, except via a set of patches for Chromium.

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.

GPU layer composition was available in Firefox for ages, long before WebRender. It just was not enabled on Linux by default due to fear of bad drivers. But anyone who heard about it or asked about performance on various forums knows about layers.force-enable in about:config.

Check about:gpu - sounds like hardware acceleration isn't working.

It seems intentionally disabled. The about:gpu page reports the following:

>Accelerated video decode is unavailable on Linux: [137247](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137247)

>Disabled Features: accelerated_video_decode

Just video or everything?

At least on MacOS firefox plays nice with Gsuite. Youtube can be hit or miss at high framerates every now and then.

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