Ubuntu's Chromium Snap Now Allows Enabling Native Wayland Support

[mangeek]

This is pretty great news if you use Ubuntu on a Raspberry Pi or other arm64 system. With no option for a native Chrome from Google, we've been stuck with both major browsers only available as snaps, and the snaps haven't let you use native Wayland. Chrome in a snap running Ubuntu on 20.04 libraries through xwayland is a... less than stellar experience when every CPU cycle counts.

So... the benchmarks are showing MotionMark -slower- under native Wayland, but the browser feels snappier and doesn't blip the entire screen out when in full screen. Overall, a better experience.

I do have some concerns that the snap might be built against a pretty old graphics stack, so maybe the browser can't take advantage of a lot of v3d improvements? I can't seem to get Chromium to see any Vulkan GPUs.

[sarmad]

this is awesome, ease of deployement to snap is very underated. great job Canonical, hoping for native wayland steam snap someday.

How does snap deployment compare to flatpak?

[schmidtbag]

Anyone know why the mouse pointer looks different compared to every other window?

[caligula]

As long as it's about Snaps, I don't care, I hate this packaging format!
Does Chromium have now working video hardware acceleration?
Since the one in Firefox is still broken and Mozilla doesn't seem to care much as the 4 month old bug ticket is still open.

The main complaints about ordinary apps was: startup time too fast - doesn't make sense to market new PCIe 6 16x SSD drives when even in 2022 a PATA HDD starts up browser in less than 10 seconds. Snap fixes this. They're constantly looking for slower alternatives to xz. Maybe PAQ at maximum settings? Native apps are also too well integrated (GUI theme, folder listings, Wayland session, pipewire sockets & shm, etc.), apps start with libc dynamic linker which is less fancy than snap loopback rube goldberg machine. Also everyone likes to make native apps and use those other formats like flatpak. So Snap is actually pretty unique here. Good vendor lock-in. Good lack of performance. Great karma. Canonical also has a magnificent track record of maintaining its NIH services.

[nist]

What is the actual state of the video hardware decoding (by gpu) of the browsers? Is that still a missing feature?

[FireBurn]

As long as it's about Snaps, I don't care, I hate this packaging format!
Does Chromium have now working video hardware acceleration?
Since the one in Firefox is still broken and Mozilla doesn't seem to care much as the 4 month old bug ticket is still open.

I'm on Chromium 103 and I have working video acceleration, I need to pass in "--enable-features=VaapiVideoDecoder --disable-features=UseChromeOSDirectVideoDecoder"

I use https://chrome.google.com/webstore/d...bflkikinpkodlk to block videos in formats which aren't accelerated on my GPU (AV1 on my main and VP9 & AV1 on my old machine)

[krzyzowiec]

Wow, Chromium with Wayland support is really nice! It's still just my backup browser to Firefox, but I am impressed.

[archerallstars]

Whether you use Chrome or Chromium-based browsers, especially on laptop, this ozone option = Wayland should be set to enabled. Otherwise, pinch zoom on your touchpad wouldn't work.

I'm on Chromium 103 and I have working video acceleration, I need to pass in "--enable-features=VaapiVideoDecoder --disable-features=UseChromeOSDirectVideoDecoder"

Wow, nice, I am on Chrome 101. Enabling these options doesn't activate video acceleration for me.

The only app that can fully use video acceleration on my Intel iGPU on Linux is the default video player app on Fedora 36 GNOME. You can see the set up from Intel Graphics - Best practices and settings for hardware acceleration?

[zoomblab]

Can't you use a native Chromium build or a flatpak?

WHY would anyone put his hands in ostree poo? If you like redhat funded, controlled and gnome dysfunctional designed stuff just use their oses.

[timrichardson]

Wow, nice, I am on Chrome 101. Enabling these options doesn't activate video acceleration for me.

It won't because Chrome doesn't yet enable it for Linux. It's just turned off. But chromium builds can enable it, and most do.
Standard Firefox supports hardware decoding, although at the moment you must set an environment variable which disables one security feature, and you must set a flag in firefox to turn it on (only one). See the arch wiki.