> Yes, while the Chrome/Chromium hardware decoding, or any other uses of the GPU, like WebGL, was always impeccable on Linux

Have you seen the massive blacklist Chromium maintains?

Yeah, Chromium even blacklists perfectly ordinary 2020s "choose this for a quiet life" Intel igpus that work fine in Firefox (and, weirdly, Chrome itself).

First thing to do with Chromium has always been adding various flags to force-enable things, followed by changing a bunch of chrome://gpu settings. Not sure why Chrome does better, but it's closed source so no reasonable way of knowing what it was up to.

Firefox did go through a rough patch 4-5 years ago where it needed various things in about:config to get hw decode when running under Wayland, but it's gone back to working out of the box for me in whatever ESR version has come with the last couple of Debian releases.

Blacklist of what? I don't understand what a blacklist would be used for in this context. Specific unsupported hardware?

Yes.

Well, supposedly. But in my experience, there was no consequence disabling the blacklist in order to enable hardware video encoding and decoding.

My assumption would be, when there is a large corpus of crash reports for a certain configuration of hardware, knowing if it's a hardware failure, driver bug, or software incompatibly, is pretty hard. So it's probably easier to catch false positives and not get blamed for a faulty product, even if you aren't the cause. Drivers crash under the hood in windows all the time, even today, but once MS did a better job of just restarting the offending drivers where possible instead of BSODing, people thought windows was an unstable product. Which is technically true from the users perspective, even though it wasn't Microsoft's fault directly. You may have had a good combo that simply shouldn't have been on the list/was later patched/or your system is more stable that the average persons.

There was nothing special about my setup. Standard intel processor with i915 driver which I would imagine covers a fairly large chunk of installs out there.

And in my experience, there was.

One person's lived experience is another person's “supposedly”.