Hello folks,
I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 22.04 and hence for the first time am using the Firefox snap package. I’m having a few problems particularly with video playback, where it looks like Firefox is not using the GPU effectively (video playback on e.g. YouTube can sometimes be very un-smooth and uses a lot of CPU).
First, Firefox detects only the integrated Intel graphics chipset but not the NVIDIA GPU that is also in my laptop. In addition, looking at the about:support
page shows that a number of graphics options are blocklisted by gfxInfo, including HARDWARE_VIDEO_DECODING
.
I’m not sure that the latter are different from the defaults for earlier non-snap installs, but I wanted to check if there were any known constraints with the snap package that might be causing the video playback issues or the failure to detect the GPU. As far as I can tell all the snap connections are as they should be, including the hardware-observe
and opengl
interfaces:
audio-playback firefox:audio-playback :audio-playback -
audio-record firefox:audio-record :audio-record -
avahi-observe firefox:avahi-observe :avahi-observe -
browser-support firefox:browser-sandbox :browser-support -
camera firefox:camera :camera -
content[gnome-3-38-2004] firefox:gnome-3-38-2004 gnome-3-38-2004:gnome-3-38-2004 -
content[gtk-3-themes] firefox:gtk-3-themes gtk-common-themes:gtk-3-themes -
content[icon-themes] firefox:icon-themes gtk-common-themes:icon-themes -
content[sound-themes] firefox:sound-themes gtk-common-themes:sound-themes -
desktop firefox:desktop :desktop -
desktop-legacy firefox:desktop-legacy :desktop-legacy -
gsettings firefox:gsettings :gsettings -
hardware-observe firefox:hardware-observe :hardware-observe -
home firefox:home :home -
joystick firefox:joystick :joystick -
mount-control firefox:host-hunspell :mount-control -
network firefox:network :network -
network-bind firefox:network-bind :network-bind -
opengl firefox:opengl :opengl -
personal-files firefox:dot-mozilla-firefox :personal-files -
removable-media firefox:removable-media :removable-media -
screen-inhibit-control firefox:screen-inhibit-control :screen-inhibit-control -
system-files firefox:etc-firefox :system-files -
system-packages-doc firefox:system-packages-doc :system-packages-doc -
u2f-devices firefox:u2f-devices :u2f-devices -
unity7 firefox:unity7 :unity7 -
upower-observe firefox:upower-observe :upower-observe -
wayland firefox:wayland :wayland -
x11 firefox:x11 :x11 -
My system is using the nvidia-driver-525
if that is relevant to the GPU detection.
Apologies if this is not snap-related, but I wanted to check in case it’s a known limitation.
Thanks and best wishes,
-- Joe