In the Firefox code base on which the launch of Firefox 80, it was recently announced that a change has been added that disables for Linux the linking of decoding support accelerated video hardware to Wayland-based systems.
With that, now the acceleration that is provided will be using VA-API (Video Acceleration API) and FFmpegDataDecoder. Hence, support for hardware video acceleration via VA-API will also be available for Linux systems using the X11 protocol.
Previously, stable hardware video acceleration was provided only for the new backend using Wayland and the DMABUF mechanism.
For X11, throttle was not applied due to issues with the gfx drivers. Now the problem of enabling video acceleration for X11 is solved by using EGL. Additionally, for X11 systems, the ability to run WebGL over EGL is implemented, which will allow for the inclusion of support for WebGL hardware acceleration for X11 in the future.
Currently this feature remains disabled by default (enabled via widget.dmabuf-webgl.enabled), as not all issues have been resolved.
To activate the job through EGL, environment variable MOZ_X11_EGL is provided, after which the compositional components Webrender and OpenGL switch to EGL instead of GLX. The implementation is based on the new DMABUF backend for X11, which is prepared by splitting the previously proposed DMABUF backend for Wayland.
In addition, you can see the inclusion of WebRender composition systems for laptops based on AMD chips on the Windows 10 platform are compiled on the basis of the code on the basis of which the Firefox 79 version is formed.
WebRender is written in the Rust language and allows to achieve a significant increase in rendering speed and a lower CPU load due to the transfer of GPU operations to one side Rendering of the page contents, which are implemented through shaders run on the GPU.
WebRender was previously included on Windows 10 platform for Intel GPU, AMD APU Raven Ridge, AMD Evergreen and laptops with NVIDIA graphics cards. On Linux, WebRender is currently enabled for Intel and AMD cards only in nightly versions of Firefox and it is not compatible with NVIDIA cards.
For those who are on this version of the browser, they can force the inclusion in about: config and activate the settings "gfx.webrender.all" and "gfx.webrender.enabled".
Other expected changes
Finally also vale highlights that for Firefox 79 a configuration was added default to enable dynamic cookie isolation for the domain shown in the address bar (»First-party dynamic isolation», when your and third-party entries are determined based on the site's base domain).
The configuration is suggested in the configurator in the configuration section to lock motion tracking in the drop-down block of cookie blocking methods.
In addition, in Firefox 79, by default, a new screen with experimental settings is activated: "About: config #experimental".
As for other news what can we expect on Firerox 80, it is HTTPS mode which is designed to enforce HTTPS on sites. It works the way similar to HTTPS Everywhere and other HTTPS update extensions for browsers in the sense that it tries to update HTTP connections, which are not secure, to HTTPS connections, which are.
The main difference between HTTPS-only native mode and extensions is that the Mozilla implementation tries to update every HTTP connection to HTTPS.
With that Firefox informs the user if the entire site could not be loaded because it does not support HTTPS. However, the same is not true for items that cannot be uploaded to a site. Users can select to continue loading the site if it does not load completely.
So friend, how do I enable vaapi in linux? I install firefox 80 and now? because i did it and the cpu usage on youtube is still high. i am using manjaro