Firefox 153 available with support for Vulkan video decoding, JPEG-XL

Post by GreenVulpine » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 6:38 PM UTC

adrian_b wrote: post #19

temp0826 wrote: post #14

Cool, have been using vulkan video decoding via mpv for a while now and it seems fine with little or no performance hits. Glad it's made its way here as getting hardware decoding to actually work in ff has felt like a house of cards (more options are welcome). Does something need to be done to enable/switch to it?

Yes, while the Chrome/Chromium hardware decoding, or any other uses of the GPU, like WebGL, was always impeccable on Linux, with Firefox that was always an adventure, much more often not working than working (at least with an NVIDIA GPU). So I also hope that Vulkan decoding might solve this behavior of Firefox on Linux.

Post by faragon » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 6:59 PM UTC

creshal wrote: post #21

temp0826 wrote: post #14

Cool, have been using vulkan video decoding via mpv for a while now and it seems fine with little or no performance hits. Glad it's made its way here as getting hardware decoding to actually work in ff has felt like a house of cards (more options are welcome). Does something need to be done to enable/switch to it?

The primary advantage of dedicated hardware accelerators for the past ~15 years been power efficiency, rather than performance. Not much of a problem on a desktop, but very noticeable on mobile devices.

Post by krzyk » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 7:33 PM UTC

ivanjermakov wrote: post #7

Havoc wrote: post #6

Interesting - will see if I can toy with it. Word of caution though. I’ve found that on my machine (Linux/nvidia) unaccelerated video is way more power efficient. The second video is playing it kept the GPU in a high power state and that uses incrementally more power than the cpu doing software decoding I had always assumed gpu would obviously be more efficient until I measured it

All modern CPUs come with an iGPU, so it's unlikely to be software decoding. Just iGPU driver's decoder being more efficient than dGPU one.

Post by pdpi » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 7:45 PM UTC

sunaookami wrote: post #25

DemiGuru wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-153-Downloads

That's not the final release, that's an RC and tech blogs should stop reporting this as final. There were instances in the past where the RC had critical bugs.

Post by sunaookami » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 8:08 PM UTC

pdpi wrote: post #47

sunaookami wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the final release, that's an RC and tech blogs should stop reporting this as final. There were instances in the past where the RC had critical bugs.

An RC justifies the "merges" title (compare "releases")