Hello everyone,

during our last meeting, I mentioned that I would try to put together a quick how-to to optimize the performance for our participants that are using Firefox on Linux.

This may also be useful for some folks on Windows, especially these with older cards such as Radeon HD 5xxx series, which are (or maybe used to be?) blocklisted even on Windows.

Now, a big change that happened between our last meeting and this one is that, with the release of Firefox 94, hardware acceleration is (finally!) enabled by default on Linux. Yay!

However, there are a few tweaks still, so let's get on to them.

Open the browser, then type

about:config

at the address bar.

There, search for:

gfx.webrender

then double-click on gfx.webrender.all to set it to true.

(this should NOT be needed with FF 94, but it does not hurt anything either).

you can also try to force-enable the compositor (gfx.webrender.compositor.force-enabled set to true), but that glitches often enough, so be prepare to undo it.

Then, search for:

media.ff

set to true: media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled, media.navigator.mediadatadecoder_vpx_enable

If using X, set gfx.x11-egl.force-enabled to true.

This should be enough to get most people going when using the out-of-the-box FOSS drivers. For Nvidia proprietary driver users, a low-hanging fruit that's often missing is libva-vdpau-driver.

Should any questions are, please do not hesitate to reply to the list and ask.

Kind regards, Alberto Abrao