Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by chmln 3145 days ago
On Linux, its still night and day difference in favor of Chrome.

I wish FF performance was as good as it is on Windows.

As much as I want to like Mozilla, even with Quantum, there's pretty much no hardware acceleration at all, missing out on potentially big performance benefits.

As others mentioned, e.g. VDPAU has been available for a long time now and there's no excuse for not taking advantage of GPU acceleration.

Now contrast this to evil Google and Chrome.

Firefox: https://imgur.com/mvtDenC Chrome: https://imgur.com/HBOpucc

3 comments

For me it's exactly the opposite. While js and render performance might have been worse, scrolling has become more and more choppy with every chrome release while Firefox has absolutely no issues (even without quantum)
There certainly is hardware acceleration in Firefox on Linux, more then likely it has been disabaled because of your configueration/set-up/drivers. To turn it on go into your "about:config" and toggle the entry "layers.acceleration.force-enabled" to "True" and restart. Then Firefox is as fast as Chrome or faster, simple as that. Although it would be nice if there was a dialog telling the user their setup is incorrect/unsupported and giving them the option whtout digging into the config, I believe this is the number one reason people think FF is slower, cause their HW acceleration is disabled and they don't even know it is...
>There certainly is hardware acceleration in Firefox on Linux, more then likely it has been disabaled because of your configueration/set-up/drivers. To turn it on go into your "about:config" and toggle the entry "layers.acceleration.force-enabled" to "True" and restart.

Implying that it wasn't deliberately disabled. HW acceleration on Linux isn't enabled by default, and for good reason. Until those underlying reasons are changed, Linux does have a hardware-acceleration-on-Firefox problem.

Are there any articles that elaborate on what work still needs to be done?
yup.. enabled this option on Linux Mint 17.1, FireFox 51 .. crashed the nouveau driver 10 minutes later.. had to restart.
FF 57 is the first release of a big rewrite, I'm sure it will get VDPAU at some point, but they needed to get the base feature set stable first.