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.
Still waiting on Firefox to support hardware-accelerated decoding of videos though.