Firefox and graphic acceleration (Google Earth Web)

Fernando Apesteguía

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Nov 13, 2025, 3:24:24 AMNov 13

to User Questions

Hi all!

I was recently trying out Google Earth Web (https://earth.google.com/web/) and found out it is almost unusable as it is very slow.

I don't have any other noticeable problems in Firefox: other web pages render fine and fast, I can reproduce HD videos in Youtube without any issues, etc.

I use:

nvidia-driver-470-470.256.02.1402000_1

firefox-144.0_2,2

and I load nvidia-modeset from /etc/rc.conf

I tried to install Chromium and it works very well with Google Earth out of the box, so I'm wondering if I'm missing something in my Firefox configuration (it's basically the default configuration).

Any ideas?

Sad Clouds

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Nov 13, 2025, 3:59:55 AMNov 13

to Fernando Apesteguía, User Questions

Not sure about Google earth, but on Raspberry Pi 4 running Debian, I
find that Firefox is notably slower compared to Vivaldi (which is based
on Chromium engine). Also Firefox ends up crashing much more often with
complex websites that rely heavily on JavaScript, e.g. draw.io.

I think on this platform hardware acceleration is quite minimal for
both browsers, so apples to apples, Chromium based browsers seem to
offer better performance.

Fernando Apesteguía

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Nov 14, 2025, 7:17:40 AMNov 14

to Sad Clouds, User Questions

Thanks for the response.

I'm not sure about the cause of this, honestly. I think there is some misconfiguration somewhere in firefox.

I searched for this and some people also experience this in different Linux distributions like Ubutu: firefox lags to the point where Google Earth Web is unusable but Chrome works fine.

Then some other people report that firefox and Chrome both work equally well in the same Ubuntu version.

Tomek CEDRO

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Nov 14, 2025, 8:44:34 AMNov 14

to Fernando Apesteguía, User Questions

Hmm the same here 14.3-RELEASE AMD64 RTX5070 with latest nvidia devel
drivers.. in Firefox barely usable and slows down the whole system
while in Ungoogled-Chromium works fine :-)

% pkg info -x nvidia
linux-nvidia-libs-devel-580.105.08
nvidia-driver-devel-580.105.08
nvidia-drm-61-kmod-devel-580.105.08.1403000
nvidia-drm-kmod-devel-580.105.08
nvidia-kmod-devel-580.105.08.1403000
nvidia-settings-580.105.08
nvidia-xconfig-580.105.08

--
CeDeROM, SQ7MHZ, http://www.tomek.cedro.info

Fernando Apesteguía

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Nov 21, 2025, 7:59:25 AMNov 21

to Chris Hill, User Questions

On Fri, Nov 14, 2025 at 7:06 PM Chris Hill <ch...@monochrome.org> wrote:

All I have is that Google Earth Web works fine for me. I'm running
14.3-RELEASE-p5
firefox-144.0_2,2
...but I have intel graphics, not nvidia. "CoffeeLake-S GT2 [UHD
Graphics 630]" with the i915kms.ko kernel module. It's all running on
metal, not a VM.

Just a data point... I hope it's of some use.

Skylake GT2 [HD Graphics 520] with i915kms.ko and running -current works fine.

Apparently, my GeForce GT 710 is blocklisted by firefox.

about:support

HARDWARE_VIDEO_DECODING
default: available
user: force_enabled Force enabled by pref
env: blocklisted Blocklisted by gfxInfo Blocklisted; failure code FEATURE_FAILURE_VIDEO_DECODING_TEST_FAILED
runtime: unavailable Force disabled by gfxInfo Blocklisted; failure code FEATURE_FAILURE_VIDEO_DECODING_TEST_FAILED

--
Chris Hill ch...@monochrome.org

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