Hacker News Reader

Comment by nyanpasu64 | Hacker News Reader

On my Windows 7 throwback computer running an i5 3570K (a damn near top-of-the-line CPU 10 years ago) with iGPU, in Waterfox YouTube stutters when fullscreen in 1080p (even with enhanced-h264ify and hardware video decoding as far as I can tell), both in YouTube and Firefox's pop-out player. Videos play smoothly in Invidious. Enhancer for YouTube™ has a popout/embed button I could test, but it was pulled from addons.mozilla.org due to being broken by YouTube changes (it still works for me on my main computer?).

View on HN

My laptop is an i7 4xxx so it's one year newer than yours and intrinsically better specced, i7 vs i5. I have no problems with videos. It could be the NVIDIA card in my laptop or the OS. I'm on Debian 11 now, which is much newer than Windows 7. Drivers, codecs, etc are more recent and possibly more performant.

To be honest, that could be just be some interaction with Waterfox specifically. It's not the first time I have encountered people having various issues with that firefox fork that other browsers don't encounter.

My test video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEuHOFgjrAo watched at 1080p60 in full screen. It's a reasonably good test of 60fps smoothness, though synthetic scrolling tests like TestUFO screen recordings might be better strictly speaking.

- Tried creating a new blank Waterfox profile with no changes except uBlock0. It drops frames, and the borders of the video (4:3 pillarboxes on a 16:9 screen) have a blue or green tint after I seek.

- Same result in a new blank Firefox ESR 115.6.0 (last Windows 7 release) profile with uBlock0.

- The YouTube embed player at https://www.youtube.com/embed/lEuHOFgjrAo, on my main Waterfox profile, runs as smoothly as Invidious (no stutters unless I'm interacting with the player UI).

On my Linux laptop with i3-3xxxm (a low-end? CPU even 10+ years ago) with iGPU, in Firefox YouTube plays fine in fullscreen in 1080p even without forcing h264. Enhancer removal is indeed a loss. Can try ImprovedTube.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com