Harness your hardware for smoother streaming

Since browsing the web constitutes a great deal of most people’s computing time, we thought we’d see if we could find any subtle differences between each distro’s out-of-the-box Firefox configuration. We’ve said before that Firefox can be made smoother by enabling the WebRender backend and activating VA-API for hardware-accelerated video decoding. But getting this to work in the real world takes a bit of trial and error.

Both distros ship , and if you do a fresh install of Ubuntu this uses Mozilla’s Snap. Users upgrading from previous Ubuntus will get the DEB version from the repos. The first step is getting VA-API working, which on Ubuntu was pretty easy. A simple sudo apt install vainfo pulled in all the required video drivers. Then running vainfo and not getting an error message showed that iHD (the MediaSDK driver for newer Intel graphics) was ready for