Mozilla Firefox 97 fixes hardware video acceleration on Linux
Firefox 97 was released this week and, in theory, didn’t seem to bring anything big for a major version update. Well, there are changes that the release notes didn’t mention.
Firefox on Linux has had an issue related to hardware video acceleration for a while. The problem can be replicated, when the preference is enabled, the browser may not play the videos correctly or not at all.
Many users have reported that the problem is fixed in Firefox 97, except that the fix is not enabled by default.
How to enable hardware video acceleration in Firefox on Linux
1. Open the Firefox preferences page by typing about:config in the address bar. Accept the warning about potential risks and continue. You already know what to do.
2. Find the next preference.
media.ffmpeg.vaapi.habilitado
3. The option value is set to False by default. Set the value to True.
Note: You may also want to set the preference labeled “media.rdd-vpx.enabled” to true.
What does change the preference? Tells the browser to use the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) to play videos. Try playing some web videos and the performance should be less taxing on your CPU.
Hardware acceleration is often misunderstood by users, I’ve seen random comments suggesting users to disable the feature. If the web pages are not loading properly, i.e. blank, you can try disabling the setting as a workaround, but it should be a last resort. Your ad blocker, VPN, DNS settings can all play a role in pages not loading properly. I had a similar issue with Chromium-based browsers in my Windows 11 virtual machine, where some browser buttons were not showing and I had to disable hardware acceleration (unrelated to HW video acceleration) to get them to work. But, that’s a rare scenario, and usually related to video drivers, in my case it was a virtual machine, so that’s probably the problem.
Some people think that hardware acceleration uses more resources and that disabling it would help the program run better. It’s actually quite the opposite, hardware acceleration uses your graphics card (GPU) to render the visual elements of web pages and play videos. By disabling this option, you are telling the browser not to use the GPU and instead rely on the CPU for such tasks. This results in a higher than normal load on your processor, which in turn affects your system performance. Even if you don’t have a dedicated graphics card, you should keep the option enabled for best results.
Project Fission is enabled in Firefox 97
This is another thing that went unnoticed in the changelog and it also applies to Windows users. Firefox 97 enables Project Fission by default. The site isolation option, introduced last year, provides an additional layer of security to protect your data. The about:config preference for Fission is fission.autostart. This value is set to True. Here is the Bugzilla discussion related to it,
Yesterday I updated to the latest version and haven’t had any problems since. But, if you have any problems after upgrading to Firefox 97, you can try changing the option value to false to see if that fixes it.
Have you enabled hardware video acceleration in Firefox? Do you notice a difference in performance after changing the settings?
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