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Comment by gnull | Hacker News Reader

Each time I tried running Firefox over ssh with X11 it either lagged or crashed. With Wayland's Waypipe it works flawlessly, I could even watch a Youtube video through it.

I'm double checking it right now using a remove machine a few blocks away from my home. Running `ssh -X remote firefox` lags a lot worse than `waypipe ssh remote firefox`. The latter feels almost native, very responsive.

So no, I don't think we are giving up a lot. X11 was designed to work over network, but it never really did.

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The issue is the new webrenderer or how it is called. There are options in about:config to disable it and force the old webrenderer.

Then it can runs rather fast on X over SSH in LAN and somewhat okayish through the internet.

Ten years ago I was using it all the time and it was very fast over the internet and perhaps even through Tor. I do not know how they could mess it up so badly

> I could even watch a Youtube video through it.

Watching a Youtube video on remote X is rarely a problem, there's no latency involved.

Wat?

I guess GP meant input latency (since there's no input if you're just consuming a video stream).

Streaming is most sensitive to how much data you can push through the pipe in a given amount of time, not to how long it takes for a question/answer pair to travel between the server and the client.

Latency (how long it takes for messages to travel back and forth), which is where X11 over the network has major issue, doesn't matter in the specific case of watching a video.

Essentially, once you press 'play', there's just a torrent of data flowing down from the server to the client with very little need for two-way banter between the machines.

Yeah, no - X11 forwarding a video is at best "eh" when you're network local, and horrible otherwise. X11 forwarding burns a lot of bandwidth, and even when that bandwidth is available, going over TCP and SSH makes it implicitly quite latency sensitive.

It's not even fair to compare it to waypipe's h264 compressed buffer feeds.

Problem is horrible lags, and I mean just program working bad, not latency. I tried doing it with X11 now, and I gave up before I could even type "youtube" to address bar. Then I tried doing

  ssh -X remote firefox https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqZsoesa55w

and it wasn't better. I saw the new firefox window, but it stayed unresponsive.

And I bet part of the problem is due to Youtube (and browser generally) involving some non-trivial drawing technologies, rendering a video is not like showing a GTK interface.

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