why not just switch to a less hostile browser now instead of drawing it out for a few more months?

Stuff can change. Who knows. I might switch platforms until then so my choice might become invalid. I might die. No reason to do it now, when there is plenty of time.

I'm a happy Firefox user on mobile though (yeah, I know, I know the recent changes in their legal stuff)

My machine is 10 years old. With Firefox video playback on YouTube is choppy even at 1080p. With Chrome it's perfectly smooth.

If Firefox performed better for me I would have switched to it long ago. This is on Windows 10 btw.

Look into about:support, what does `HARDWARE_VIDEO_DECODING` and sibling features say? If it's off, you could try force-enabling video acceleration by setting `gfx.webrender.all` to `true` in about:config. I've had it force-enabled for years with no issues.

HARDWARE_VIDEO_DECODING does not exist but there's a bunch of rendering options. They are all set to default and available except for a few things like DIRECT2D is disabled and WEBGPU / REMOTE_CANVAS is blocked.

gfx.webrender.all was set to false. I will give true a try. Thanks.

So it's been a week. I have not noticed any issues with Firefox. I didn't even adjust this setting.

Everything is a lot smoother now than it was about 3-4 years when I last tried, even with the same hardware.

Happily using Firefox as my daily browser now.