Or maybe it's a complex engineering challenge?

The Firefox Devs aren't just sitting there not clicking a button called "enable hardware acceleration"

Well at least Chromium has support for this. I don't know why it is taking Mozilla so long honestly, but I'm guessing most of their developers don't use Linux and the org just loves to virtual-signal and not practice what they preach.

Chromium/Chrome does not support HW video decoding on desktop Linux:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=463440

Patches exist to address it, though.

So you're saying it does support it, and is often packaged that way in Linux. Remind me how it doesn't support it again?

Chromium won't take your bug reports on this feature.

google refuses to support this on desktop linux though, it requires a patched chromium build. The only reason vaapi support is there at all is because their chromeOS uses it.

I used Chromium and it is very easy to use on Arch. Not sure why you act like it isn't supported. A lot more than what is available for Firefox.

because it isn't supported, just look at the comments from google employees on the bug: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=463440...

sure the situation is better than it is with firefox, but having to use a patched chromium build isn't exactly ideal