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.
The annoying part is that hardware acceleration works on chrome OS, so we know the support is buried in there somewhere.
I doubt they will take Linux outside their own walled gardens seruously, Google has already shown their indifference to us Linux users.
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).
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.
Only some distribution-specific Chromium builds do.
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.
>Accelerated video decode is unavailable on Linux: [137247](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137247)
>Disabled Features: accelerated_video_decode
Still waiting on Firefox to support hardware-accelerated decoding of videos though.
Wait, Firefox doesn't do this already? Didn't know.
While for all major platforms even including Windows on ARM64 the performance is good for VP9, and somewhat degraded for high resolution H264 videos, the results for Mac are bad across all of them. It's not even possible to playback videos with a 480p resolution, without being affected by a lot of framedrops.
In those 15s of playback a 480p VP9 video produces around 5 dropped frames, a 720p and 1080p video already ~45 dropped frames. Really worse it is with 4k@60fps videos which have more than 400 dropped frames even with a playback speed of 1.0x!
www.mpv.io : a lightweight player that among other things can transparently stream any url understood by youtube-dl
It uses 20x as much cpu as mpv. For purposes of comparison this is like Toyota selling a car that goes just as fast as your Ford so long as you are OK with only getting 4MPG.
There is an addon if you prefer to right click on a url and open in mpv or in an addon like Tridactyl you can do the same with your keyboard. It also lets you speed up and slow down the playback speed which is nice for speakers who talk too slow and take a while to get to the point.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726
Bug opened 4 years ago. Hundreds of millions in revenue and can't task one person for a summer to hook into the support that already exists.
and probably < 0.5% of it due to its linux userbase?
Firefox has 230 million monthly users, using FF for an average of over 5 hours per day.
Many executives would sell their families for less opportunity.
I seriously doubt that those 20% Firefox users even consider doing a $1 donation.
After all plenty also switch to other search engines.
Its probably more fair to go on profit not revenue.
100 million in revenue * 2.18% is 2.2 million. A decrease of 10% of that is 220k. If engineers at mozilla are 150k then 3 months of work is aprox 38k.
This would put the break even point at losing 2% of its linux users by not spending the money.
> 3 months of work
according to whom? this will almost certainly need more than a single engineer's eyes on it. and even if it is 3 months, that's 3 months they don't spend working on features for 98% of their userbase.
i want this to happen as much as anyone, but i just don't see the compelling math here. it's a chicken-egg problem (if FF could use VA API [1], then more might switch to linux).
personally, i'm happy that Panfrost recently got mainlined.
It seems to work fine on my system running Ubuntu 18.04 with ublock origin installed. Which OS are you using?
I still use it as my default browser on macOS though because it does excel in other areas.
No extensions, no GIFs, no heavy tabs open, perhaps one or two open tabs.
No slowdowns at all after 8 hours on Slack w/ Safari or Brave. Firefox is definitely the worst browser on macOS, compared to the Windows version where it's absolutely perfect and always quick.
Google has been getting better though with supporting FF. They now support Hangouts on FF and Gmail is actually faster for me in FF than it is in Chrome.
A mute point however now with EdgeChrome.
Fun fact, the word "moot" has the same origin as "meet". A "moot point" was originally "something that has to be discussed and decided at a meeting" (like a town hall or similar). Thus there was no sense in discussing it, since it was up to the meeting to decide. Also, scouts still call their congregations "a moot".
<small rant mode>
Nowadays I have two sources of errors when writing.
My own lack of knowledge, or incorrect knowledge, and then the stupid auto corrections that just go down the drain due to me mostly typing across multiple languages. </small rant mode>
So whatever caused it, thanks again.
I guess Mozilla wins this way.
Thumderbird is underrated.
Back home, Thunderbird, and the occasional donations.
1. Mozilla Corp. dropped Thunderbird as one of their projects, and told the community they would have to figure out how to move ahead with the project if they wanted to. News of "Thunderbird is dead" spread out after this announcement.
2. It turned out there was plenty of interest in the project among the public. Donations came in, and the project was kept alive. They established the "Thunderbird Council" as their governance body.
3. The project still needed some legal home and assistance. The Mozilla Foundation (the non-profit) offered to serve as that. The council studied several options and decided to accept this offer.
And this is how they got here: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/about/
[1]: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/68.0/releaseno...
[2]: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/60.0/releaseno...
The layman hates updates.
It sucks that we have to do that, but I can't entirely blame them for making their own products work better on their own browser.
You mean like MS for a long time did with MSIE?
Are we really back in the 90s, back to “This page works best in $one_specific_browser”?
This is not the future I was hoping for... On the flip side I can use Linux for almost anything, so i guess it’s not all bad.
Do webdevs really check for Chrome AND Firefox compatibility? The devs I know consider the job done as long as their site works with Chrome.
That would technically only make them Chrome-devs.
Rambox went proprietary, but was forked into Hamsket. Might be easier than what you're using now.
0: Even with remote code execution vulnerabilities enabled it shows a corporate spam clip instead of the video I'm trying to watch.
SpiderMonkey should get around to jitting generators, but I have a hard time blaming the team for focusing on real-world improvements first.
That is benchmarcking most used ALEXA websites. It's named TP 5 and TP6, mozilla use it internally (e. G to measure progress on stylo) Why is the real world (TP5/6) not public?? Phoronix has never used it, mozilla has never publicly published benchmarcks. I guess they favor chromium but I've never seen all results only the few mozillians posted on bugzilla. Let the world know, publish the results, even if it favor chromium. Anyway the mainstream will never be affected by that public information (most people have difficulties discerning a search engine from the concept of browser, let alone talking about benchmarcks)
Maybe there are people (ab)using the async stuf do do something else, but at least it's not really common.
I'd be curious to see how 68 versus 69 versus 70 compare.
I use the HTML version instead to deal with this issue
Informative and easy to digest. I can only think of one other company blogging with similar consistency/quality: Cloudflare.
Firefox performance has seen tremendous gains since their Project Quantum efforts.
It mostly feels on par with Chrome for me pretty much everywhere.
There is one glaring omission though: a single company where I have problems with FF on multiple apps - Google.
Gmail was still dog-slow the last time I tried, Youtube can send my fan into a frenzy and Docs is also regularly problematic. (on Linux)