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Comment by sawwit | Hacker News Reader

This is my Firefox wish list:

* Make no distinction between tabs and bookmarks, so that I can search for tabs in the bookmark library and easily arrange them and move them to bookmark folders etc.

* Add optional tab auto-suspend for heavy JS web apps so that they don't eat all CPU cycles in the background.

* Please do something about graphics accelerated video playback. My machine runs hot with 460p YouTube videos, even with h264ify (110% CPU FF, and by comparison only 34% VLC!).

* Be more keyboard friendly: Escape to defocus the address and search bars, page up/down in the add-ons list.

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I think you can't compare it to VLC, as Firefox also has to do more stuff while playing videos on YouTube. For a fair comparison you would have to compare Firefox playing a plain video file (without a website) vs VLC or YouTube on Chrome vs YouTube on Firefox.

You are right and I gave it a go: I've tested it with a 640x386 H264 movie clip averaged over the same time span with a blank Firefox profile:

    VLC: 14.0 %
    Firefox: 27.1 %

Edit: Interesting. I tried it with a different video (H264, 720p) and it turned the results around (33% VLC and 28% Firefox), there was more movement in this clip, so it turns out to be more complex to measure this.

Now you'll have to take into account, that H.264 is a patented codec. VideoLAN is based in France [1], but Mozilla is US. Therefore they can't just ship an implementation.

On Windows Firefox uses the Windows Media Feature Pack to play H.264, and on Linux a plugin by Cisco.

Considering this, I think 27 % vs 14 % doesn't look too bad :)

[1] http://www.videolan.org/legal.html

btw, Firefox 43+ on Linux uses the system ffmpeg library. Before that it used GStreamer, which was very crashy and usually just called ffmpeg anyway. :) Firefox telemetry shows that 97% of Linux users have ffmpeg, but only 70% have GStreamer. So this change increases H.264 availability, reduces crashing, while removing code.

The Cisco OpenH264 plugin is currently only used for WebRTC, not MP4 video playback. OpenH264 only supports H.264 Baseline Profile, but YouTube, for example, uses the higher-quality H.264 Main Profile. Cisco or Mozilla could add Main Profile support to OpenH264, but people would still need an AAC decoder to watch most MP4 videos. ffmpeg solves both codec problems. For the 3% of Linux users (and 2% of Windows users) who don't already have H.264 and AAC codecs installed, Adobe's CDM (their DRM plugin for HTML5 video) will eventually allow Firefox to decode H.264 and AAC content that is not DRM'd. Props to Adobe! :)

It's perhaps specifically a problem with YouTube, or the JS events for the video playback, or something related to that:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1163327

Oh well, I'll just use a bookmarklet/AppleScript to open YouTube videos in VLC, if is too sluggish (VLC supports YouTube URLs via menu item Open Network…).

What OS are you using? On Linux, Firefox and I believe VLC use the system library. Firefox on Linux doesn't yet support hardware-accelerated graphics rendering.

YouTube is doing DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) which involves stitching together an MPEG-4 file using JavaScript from multiple components retrieved over HTTP.

+ reduced memory footprint and/or better swapping. It isn't practical to run Firefox on a machine with 2GB RAM.

"Don't open so many tabs!"

Swap my tabs to disk before the OS does!

(It's okay, I bought 16GB extra RAM so that I could run Firefox.)

The awesome little cheap Windows 8.1 (or 10) tablets with the quad core Atom processors and 1GB RAM are great, and Chrome/Opera runs just fine on them.

Firefox though, is like trying to run through molasses.

I run Firefox on my laptop, my phone (Firefox for Android + uBlock = Amazing) and desktop. I have to use Opera on the tablet.

Anything that drastically reduces memory usage, and preferably increases multicore utilization, would be greatly appreciated.

Here's mine:

Stop forcing automatic updates.

I've never really understood this mindset. Browsers are big 'ol security holes, you want to shovel as many of the latest security updates into them as quickly as possible. Surely the risk of you getting owned by a patched exploit because you forgot to update outweighs most concerns?

Not to mention you can turn them off in the preferences.

You can turn those off. Options > Advanced > Update > Check Never

Alternatively, he could switch to the Extended Support Release (ESR) channel -- which BTW I've been using happily for years. The ESR channel gets security updates, but otherwise updates itself only once a year:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all/?q=E...

Then head on over to the options and turn them off?

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