Firefox and youtube playback

[Luke]

I spent some time playing with different browsers and exploring youtube playback options, and in this post I list my findings. Although Chromium is quicker than Firefox on the Pinebook - especially if you put in time to do some modifications - to my knowledge, it lacks a good plugin for easy playback of youtube (and other) videos using external player. I looked all over, read countless threads, but found just one plugin utility for chromium that kinda-sorta works.  However, it requires a lot of setup and is not a simple click-and-play solution because it requires you to have VLC launched in the background as well as a VLC server running at localhost:8080. I generally found it quite unreliable. 

So I moved onto Firefox. For starters, I did some tweaking to improve Firefox performance from terrible - to usable. Some things can be tweaked from the settings panel while others have to be enabled from a hidden options list. The very basics can be found in Preferences -> Advanced and:
In general: disable Smooth Scrolling
In Data Choices: disable Firefox Health Report

For the more advanced tweaks one needs to enter about:config in the URL bar. There is a search bar at the top so you can look for the settings I list below.

For starters you may want to make sure to prevent pinch-to-zoom behaviour by setting:
zoom.maxPercent to 100
zoom.minPercent to 100

Then find and set the following:
network.http.pipelining true
Network.http.proxy.pipelining true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests 8

Its also worth adding the following integers by right clicking anywhere on the about:config page, selecting New -> integer:

content.notify.interval 500000
browser.cache.memory.capacity 65536

Lastly, similarly to Chromium, it’s a good idea to move cache to ram by setting the following:
Browser.cache.disk.enable false
Browser.cache.memory.enable true
Browser.cache.memory.capacity  -1

The last variable can be tweaked; value of 100000 = 100mb RAM. The -1 value, as I understand it, refers to dynamic allocation of RAM usage. I don't know what the optimal setting for this ought to be.  Also, you can find out more about how much ram is used and other options by entering about:cache in the browser bar. 

Now that faster Firefox performance is improved (subjectively, when running off of eMMC, it’s on par with Chromium in Mate DE) we can move onto enabling playback via VLC player.

The plugin needed to achieve this is called VLC Youtube Shortcut. Extensive instructions are not needed for getting this to work - after installing the plugin, you will be able to just right click the youtube (or other) video in Firefox and select Play Video from link from the drop-down menu. 

To get good playback in VLC some tinkering is needed … but that is a topic for a different post.

Enjoy.

[xalius]

Thanks for writing this up, going to try now...

[Luke]

Great : I also suggest trying these out: 

layout.frame_rate.precise false
privacy.trackingprotection.enabled true
image.mem.max_decoded_image_kb 51200
javascript.options.mem.high_water_mark 30

They help the performance even further but one or more contribute to more frequent crashes.

[jordanjay29]

For starters you may want to make sure to prevent pinch-to-zoom behaviour by setting:
zoom.maxPercent to 100
zoom.minPercent to 100

If you want to retain the ability to zoom with the ctrl and +/- buttons, you can alter the mousewheel.with_control.action setting instead. From Mozilla's wiki:

Customizing default action of "wheel" event. The value 0 means "Do nothing", 1 means "Scroll contents", 2 means "Go back or forward in the history", 3 means "Zoom in or out the contents".

[Luke]

For starters you may want to make sure to prevent pinch-to-zoom behaviour by setting:
zoom.maxPercent to 100
zoom.minPercent to 100

If you want to retain the ability to zoom with the ctrl and +/- buttons, you can alter the mousewheel.with_control.action setting instead. From Mozilla's wiki:

Customizing default action of "wheel" event. The value 0 means "Do nothing", 1 means "Scroll contents", 2 means "Go back or forward in the history", 3 means "Zoom in or out the contents".

Excellent. As a side note, how is the firefox experience for you ? despite so many people saying that firefox is dead slow compared to chromium, I find that with these tweaks its on par with chromium in the Mate desktop (installed on eMMC).

[Sheorath]

For starters you may want to make sure to prevent pinch-to-zoom behaviour by setting:
zoom.maxPercent to 100
zoom.minPercent to 100

If you want to retain the ability to zoom with the ctrl and +/- buttons, you can alter the mousewheel.with_control.action setting instead. From Mozilla's wiki:

Customizing default action of "wheel" event. The value 0 means "Do nothing", 1 means "Scroll contents", 2 means "Go back or forward in the history", 3 means "Zoom in or out the contents".

Excellent. As a side note, how is the firefox experience for you ? despite so many people saying that firefox is dead slow compared to chromium, I find that with these tweaks its on par with chromium in the Mate desktop (installed on eMMC).

I think Firefox is with these tweaks better then Chromium. Anyway its very laggy

[jordanjay29]

Had to wait for my 24 hr cooldown to expire. Can't say I'm a fan of these anti-spam measures, way too heavy.

Anyway, my experience with Firefox isn't bad. It's tolerable, although slow and loading webpages takes a long time to begin displaying the page. YouTube playback is terrible, Netflix playback is...what Netflix playback? But for checking email, forums, and (slowly) a chat web app like IRC or Discord, it's functional and satisfactory.

I haven't had anything that would make me ditch it at this point, but I won't be singing praises for Firefox on the Pinebook anytime soon.

I wonder if someone could benchmark Firefox on a Ubuntu build vs Android, both loading desktop sites of some popular websites. Would be interesting to see the performance difference.

[pfeerick]

Anyway, my experience with Firefox isn't bad. It's tolerable, although slow and loading webpages takes a long time to begin displaying the page.

Indeed I feel that Chrome is better on my side, but it could just be the pages I visit.

Anyway, I've started playing with qupzilla, and at first look, it seems to be a bit quicker than either firefox or chrome, and that's right out of the box, no tweaks, so it might be possible to get some really nice performance out of it.

[jordanjay29]

Qupzilla sounds interesting, I haven't really played around much with nascent browsers since around 2007 or so (so long Flock). I'll have to give it a shot.

[Luke]

Quick note: looks like Firefore has been updated with multi-core support and the performance is now considerably better than on Chromium with the aforementioned tweaks. So update your Firefox and apply the tweaks