I recently switched from Chromium to Firefox on MNT Reform and while I generally like the UI/UX a lot more, and the fact that it will run natively on wayland, I was unhappy with some performance details like video playback. It turns out that this is mostly related to GPU vs software scaling/compositing.
So, you can go to about:config
and set layers.acceleration.force-enabled
to true
, but this will cause nasty GPU glitches. Trying to debug this today I recorded a Firefox session with apitrace
. Strangely, the playback of the OpenGL capture was clean—no glitches to be seen. My unconfirmed intuition is that the glitches are some CPU/GPU buffer sharing problem. I discovered that setting dom.ipc.processCount
to 1
instead of the default 8
greatly reduces the problem, so it appears to be inter-process/threading related. With this configuration, videos will be scaled to fullscreen smoothly: even software decoded 720p@60 FPS and 1080p@30 FPS works.
In a semi-related note, I was looking for an alternative to the Twitter website today, because it is unbearably slow. To my surprise, I found the previously unknown to me tweetdeck.twitter.com
, which feels 10x faster than the regular Twitter web and also more customizable (you can remove “Trends”, for example).