Existential browser crisis.

[Haswellx86]

I run Linux. I used to use Chromium. Found out that the lag of scrolling YouTube Shorts and the live stream chat doesn't exist on Firefox, so I switched to LibreWolf. Not only because of that but Firefox runs native on Wayland. I did enable the Ozone platform for Chromium but it had a small UI rendering issue which actually now seems to have been fixed in an update and Wayland seems to work fine. Not only that but hardware accelerated video decoding works out-of-the-box on Firefox on Linux whereas it is not supported by native in Chromium for Linux and has to be enabled using VA-API with OpenGL, Vulkan or other rendering backends. I didn't do proper testing but I think that Firefox based browsers run lighter and take less memory than Chromium. At that time, I did know that Chromium is still superior in many aspects of performance but after doing brief web browsing on Firefox, I thought that it is actually slightly faster on it. I don't know if that is true or what.

 

Recently I got frustrated how scrubbing through a YouTube video always takes slightly more time. I got into the dilemma that browsers suck and that I need native apps, even though how true that might be, no first party is putting in the efforts. For e.g., I installed the Perplexity App, thinking it should run better than on the browser. It literally takes the same amount of resources if not more to render a damn box for input. It's the exact clone using web technologies. I am thankful of Google (Google is really nice guys) to make the API keys free and I use a freaking terminal to chat (also because the AI Studio web page is SO horrible for long chats; extremely poor performance). I could rant for long but the point is, I did find a third party client (only limitation is no Google integration for accessing my feed) for YouTube for Linux and that not only runs much faster and uses less power, for essentially what is watching videos, scrubbing is also faster.

 

But I wondered if that is a browser issue and yes, the videos do scrub faster on Chromium. That is making me to switch to Chromium again, and also that literally all the things run faster on Chromium. On YouTube, I face 3 problems.

1. The sidebar on the homepage runs on a lower FPS (30?). For some reason in a video, that side bar renders more smoothly.
2. Scrolling YouTube shorts is jittery. Also, I remember opening the comments of shorts and also scrolling it was in much lower FPS. Now the comments do scroll smooth (Firefox's still feel smoother), and the opening animation of the comments seems to also have smoothed out a bit but is visibly laggier than Firefox.
3. The live stream chat is also very laggy when scrolling. This is where it is straight up inefficiency because while scrolling it in Chromium, I see that my CPU is using much more power than on LibreWolf. I think it is some hardware acceleration optimization issue. In a very populated live stream where the chat is always going, I am basically burning my CPU all of the time. I think even text input is laggier as well in the chat.

 

[Haswellx86]

Apparently the side bar thing seems to run smoothly on Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. But the other problems are the same. And on Edge the live stream chat is way laggier (didn't enable hardware decode for that but the load was pretty light).