Fedora Kinoite and Silverblue come shipped with Firefox pre-installed, but without hardware acceleration libraries because of licensing issues with those dependencies.

To fix this, here’s the short version:

# Uninstalls Firefox from base ostree image. Requires restart
sudo rpm-ostree override remove firefox firefox-langpacks

# Installs Firefox
flatpak install flathub org.mozilla.firefox

# Extensions for video codecs, hardware acceleration drivers, etc
flatpak install flathub org.freedesktop.Platform.ffmpeg-full org.freedesktop.Platform.VAAPI.Intel org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default

More info on additional Flatpak runtime extensions: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/available-runtimes.html

If this doesn’t resolve your performance issues completely, there are more tips below in this post.

Further Firefox changes

In case you still have performance problems, you may have some success with the tips by Dadrophenia from Reddit, such as visiting about:config and changing to the following settings:

gfx.webrender.all=true
media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled=true
media.ffvpx.enabled=false # (maybe not required anymore?)
media.av1.enabled=false # (maybe not required anymore?)

There’s also this wiki page from Fedora regarding hardware acceleration that might be useful: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Firefox_Hardware_acceleration Note: it assumes regular DNF/YUM install, not Flatpak.

Fallback to rpm-ostree install

RPM Fusion repository doesn’t work super great with rpm-ostree, however they do have a dedicated guide on this topic: https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/OSTree

This then assumes you don’t override the ostree base image. You can revert your Firefox overrides by running:

# Re-enables Firefox from base ostree image. Requires restart
sudo rpm-ostree override reset firefox firefox-langpacks
#                        ^^^^^
#                       "reset" instead of "remove"

Fallback to Chromium

I know, I know… We’re talking about Firefox here. But some workloads like hardware-accelerated video encoding × Firefox × Flatpak × Wayland, are perhaps not super well supported yet.

Chromium handles this better, and can sometimes be a necessary option when your job relies on web conference tools like Zoom or Google Meet.

Switching to the Flatpak version of Brave (which is a Chromium-based browser) has worked great for me whenever my Firefox starts hogging CPU.

flatpak install flathub com.brave.Browser

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(Photo by patrice schoefolt)