Actually Chrome on Linux doesn't use hardware acceleration for video playback and never did, while the most recent Firefox almost does, if one turns a couple of experimental knobs.
Off topic but I just tried to move from MacOS to Pop!_OS and this is the main reason that I can't migrate now. No GPU Accel on Chrome means scrolling is horrid on QHD/higher resolution (besides YouTube being pretty much useless). Firefox is fine but there's no user profile modes to separate between my various profiles. With so much work being done on browsers, it feels weird that Linux is so behind on this. And Chrome seem to not want to implement the GPU acceleration at all. I guess I'll pay the Apple tax for the foreseeable future.
Well, I am not sure I understand what you mean. There are two distinct GPU Acceleration technologies at work here:
- for videos
- for website rendering
AFAIK the video acceleration part is the big problem as the issue was ignored for many years by the browser vendors. For rendering websites most browser should do just fine, some hardware-browser combinations might be exceptions though.
I also wonder what you mean by Firefox has no user profiles, because Firefox has a profile concept too. Be default it doesn't ask you, but when you start it with `firefox --ProfileManager` you will see what I mean. I don't like messing with the Profile Manager every time, so I just have different Icons for starting different Profiles (e.g. Music --> Spotify, Movies --> Amazon & Netflix, etc.).
Currently there are just two websites for which I have to use Chromium:
1. Geforce Now, officially Linux is not supported, but with Chromium it does work when you change your user-agent
2. Binance, for whatever reason their login capture doesn't work with Firefox
OK so I'm not sure what's happening with the scrolling. But it's definitely smoother on Firefox than on Chrome. I'm sure it's not my hardware/OS combination (1060 + PopOS w/ Nvidia blobs).
On the profiles part: I am aware of the --ProfileManager option. But the icon is new to me. Should be worth trying. Thanks. Work uses G Suite so I don't know how Meet + some other tools react with Firefox.
I prefer using Firefox anyway, but if you want to dig deeper regarding your Chrome GPU acceleration you might find the following pages valuable:
chrome://gpu/ -- here you can see the current status of your GPU Acceleration
chrome://flags/ -- search for 'GPU' or 'accel'. This is the place where you can override some related settings, but be aware, that this might break your browser, so better backup your browser configuration directory before changing anything ;-)
Firefox added hardware acceleration support very recently, June for Wayland and end of August for X11, and needs to be manually enabled plus YouTube needs to be told to use a supported codec. It's also possible your distro isn't supporting it yet.
