Porteus

I'm a Chrome fan but I installed Firefox 31.0 earlier this week and started to notice the difference in video stream quality between these browsers. Here's an example-

Mozilla Firefox 31.0
http://i58.tinypic.com/288067q.png

Chrome 36
http://i61.tinypic.com/33nxh74.png

So I played a Youtube video on both the browsers and took screenshots to notice the difference clearly. Both the videos were playing at 720p. However, Firefox was the browser which managed to deliver the better video quality. Notice how the video on Chrome looks kinda pixelated and blurry? See how the lines in Nexus 9's wallpaper look straight on Firefox, while on Chrome, they look uneven and broken. Here's a cropped side by side comparison - http://i61.tinypic.com/2mg5nxu.jpg

Is this a browser issue or an issue with flash? HTML5 playback for YouTube is enabled on Chrome, so I disabled HTML5 and switched to Flash but still got the same results. Chrome is using Shockwave Flash 14.0 and Firefox is using 11.2.

Is there a workaround for this? Since Flash 11.2 is clearly delivering better output, is there a way to make Chrome ditch the flash version (14.0) that comes with it and switch to an older version i.e. 11.2? Thanks!

To me the entire (firefox) image looks soft and blurred. Look at the text in the youtube toolbar, the annotation and the subtitles. It is as if the entire picture has been put through a blur filter. I prefer the chrome one as it looks much sharper. To answer the question, I think it is really going to depend on the GPU of the system and if flash is using said GPU or doing software rendering.