How did these clowns manage to make my mouse cursor laggy? It is incomprehensible for me to live in such a big bubble with such a big paycheck and then spend zero brainpower on systems without graphics acceleration.
This is extremely bad engineering and these engineers should be called out for it. It takes a special kind of person to deliver this and be proud of it.
Once they made their millions at Google these engineers will be our landlords, angel investors, you name it. The level of ignorance is unfathomable. Very sad.
The expressed goal is emotionally impacting UX. They clearly got strong emotions out of you. Mission accomplished!
Macbook air M1 scrolls text in Firefox fast and smoothly...
I don't think it's performance bottlenecking so much as that the site is capturing the cursor and taking over its physics/acceleration, I think? Which probably isn't noticeable as long as the acceleration is similar to how your OS shell is configured, but was definitely noticeable for me on GNOME.
“then spend zero brainpower on systems without graphics acceleration”
I don't know what graphics acceleration mean in this context, but my 5-year old computer, with 4 Gb of RAM and no discreet graphics card didn't witness any lag.
It's not just a laggy mouse. I scrolled through half a page of a completely black screen. On a high powered machine with lots of bandwidth and low latency.
The designers here have lost the plot.
I'm on mobile and scrolled through most of this waiting for images to load, and wondering why I didn't see any.
Working perfectly fine in LibreWolf on macOS. Huh.
The cursor was laggy for about 10-15 seconds on my M4 Max after the page loaded, my only sin is probably not using Chrome.
34% modernity, 32% subculture, 30% rebelliousness made me cringe.
Very unusually, everything is working and smooth on Fennec F-Droid for me. Usually it's the opposite but it happens more often these days.
I know you aren't supposed to comment on it, but man, you just never know what will set people off on this site, and god knows they won't tell you. Are people bothered that I chimed in to say "works for me" or that I insinuated Fennec F-Droid is usually less smooth than the Webkit-based mobile browsers? I'll never know for sure. Sometimes with Hacker News, whether a comment is actually well-received feels like a dice roll.
My naive guess is that it's a null hypothesis situation. You not seeing a problem isn't a useful indicator for if there is a problem. More than that, it probably hits too close to home for mostly software devs, with the dreaded "Well it works on my machine."
Must be something like that. More than anything, I'd love to know why Firefox seems to be winning on this page; practically the opposite of what you'd expect out of Google pages (because, even without a tinfoil hat on, it's clear they don't test on Firefox often). Maybe uBlock Origin is just cutting out some poorly-written script, who knows.
And they are very well paid for all that work!
I could do way better and I am not even a web developer. Their talent is social networking and/or securing the job somehow. :P
Couldn't agree more. It's basically a page with some pictures in it, and everything in it loaded so late for me that initially I wondered why they left so many large empty spaces in the page.
This could work and be fast with tech from at least 20 years ago, probably even more. It's really incredible this is output from a company valued in trillions.
Indeed. Google is the worst at designing around lazy loading. Their UIs in Drive, Youtube Music, and others essentially become unusable once the list gets long. God forbid you don't have a super low latency connection straight to the data center. Even holding open a web socket to fetch "next pages" doesn't cut it in most of the real world. If you're gonna lazy load (which I admit sometimes does make sense) you need to aggressively fetch the next page. If I have 200 files in my Google Drive and they're sorted alphabetically, and I want one that starts with "y", the UX is so unbelievable bad that I sometimes wonder if I'm being pranked. I'll have to wait through a dozen "next page" loads that only load a screen worth of files at a time, and each pause makes me wait a second or two. That really adds up when I just want to scroll to the file. Scrolling through large playlists in Youtube Music is utterly painful nowadays too.
Please people, test your UI on low bandwidth connections, high latency connections, and both conditions together. It doesn't need to be perfect, but it doesn't have to be anywhere near this bad. HN performs way, way better than these modern javascript heavy lazy loading apps, and I think there's some important insights in that sitting right there for the taking.
Scrolling back in google chat is another horrendous experience. Trying to see a message you sent last week? Scrolling up is like “here’s 5 messages”… “here’s 4 messages”… “here’s another 5”. It’s like a college student wrote it.
Oh yes! Totally forgot about that one because I rarely use google chat, but that is insane. It really feels like somebody built an example app as a joke of how not to do it, and somebody else accidentally shipped it.
Especially when metadata is so cheap to send over. Even if you have literally thousands of files, there's no reason why they couldn't send it all in a single JSON at first page load. Gzipped it would be nothing.
If you hate how Google Drive works get excited about searching in the new Outlook. Nothing like being able to not sort your search results and only getting 200 at a time and having to page through them when the search returns anything useful at all.
The crazy thing is, theyve written one of the best guides on the internet on how to do an infinite scrolling list: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/infinite-scroller
> How did these clowns manage to make my mouse cursor laggy? It is incomprehensible for me to live in such a big bubble with such a big paycheck and then spend zero brainpower on systems without graphics acceleration.
I have a dual GPU setup with one GPU dedicated to browsers, the cursor still freezes while scrolling and jitters after that and has noticeable lag even when not scrolling across both Chromium based browsers and Firefox on Windows. I'd compare it to a video game with really bad aim acceleration where the mouse just feels sluggish and uncooperative.
I like that people are studying what works and what doesn't in UI/UX, but I'm not sure why they have to break the basics in the process of doing that - that is quite distracting from the overall experience and makes it kind of miserable, just as opening a very JS heavy SPA or what have you would.
They also seemingly went out of their way to prevent ctrl/cmd+click on several anchor elements in pages like https://m3.material.io/components.
Arrreg!! So many of these React (et al) sites, with poorly re-built elements and break the built-in functionality! The A tag works perfect! But no, we need three or four nested divs, components, and many lines of JS to end up with something worse.
Is React the driver? Do devs just not know? Is management pushing garbage?
With every client-side routing framework or library I know of, the trivial happy path will involve using their provided link component which performs client-side navigations on click but also renders an underlying anchor tag with href (and works with cmd-click, middle-click etc.).
You really have to go out of your way to break this, and I don't think client-side routers deserve any blame for this. Anyone who is ignorant or careless enough to ship broken links using a client-side router would be just as likely to break anchor tags with their own hand-rolled JavaScript.
> Is React the driver? Do devs just not know? Is management pushing garbage?
I'd say developers who aren't web developers trying to do web dev seems to be the cause of this. Understanding the platform you're developing for is pretty much table stakes for any developer, and not understanding when to use <a> is pretty much the most basic mistake you can make. Literally the first things you learn in web development is about linking to other pages, yet somehow still people fuck up putting a <a> into a webpage properly. Boggles my mind.
React makes it as easy as any other library/framework, but if you don't think about what ends up in the DOM, and why certain things have to be a specific way (often for accessibility and user experience), then you'll screw up even big and expensive projects like this apparently. 2x boggling since this project is literally all about user experience yet they get the most fundamental part of the web wrong.
> I'd say developers who aren't web developers trying to do web dev seems to be the cause of this.
Hard disagree. I've seen a ton of decent web developers (i.e. people who can use modern CSS, layouts, and modern web stacks) reinventing buttons and links and forgetting about accessibility.
It's a completely orthogonal thing to the dev background.
If you render an <a> in React (or Angular, which I think they're using here), it's just an <a>! You have to do extra work to fuck it up!
I'll generally excuse things like laziness and incompetence, because I understand that not everyone is good at their jobs.
But this:
> You have to do extra work to fuck it up!
resonates so hard. I get so angry at people who take extra time out of their day to put so much effort into making things worse. So many things on the internet are fine, but people spend so much on making them worse. Who is this good for? Not me, and likely not the person who wasted their time ruining functional things.
I was digging into the cursor effect just to see why it's so laggy for some people and noticed that this is actually a Next.js site.
That is news to me that Google is using Nextjs for anything.
It doesn’t do the internal navigation.
And since React doesn’t have built-in support for pushState (Yes I know React Router, but it really wants a hash router), you really need extra work for an internal router. And therefore, every beginner dev does it manually and slightly inconsistently.
So yes, React is absolutely the driver, same as Java is guilty for Guava existing, because it should have been built-in and perfect.
> Yes I know React Router, but it really wants a hash router
This doesn't sound right. The history API has been widely supported by all major browsers (including mobile) since 2013. React was also first released in 2013. Did React Router ever ship a version without a HistoryRouter.
In this case we are not talking about beginner devs (to their credit, the React docs are pushing people toward frameworks now) — these are literally the developers of a framework, fucking it up in their own docs!
One of my pet peeves is people blaming things on React that have nothing to do with React. I see this quite frequently on Hacker News. Using an a tag or not has nothing to do with React.
This website is awful. It is extremely sluggish, laggy, and annoying. On top of that, I had to wait a significant amount of time for it to load. No thanks. I thought the tab is going to be killed...
Probably because they seem to be recreating the cursor on the webpage for that cool effect. Even on a good computer I have some input lag, and going from very low input lag and 120fps cursor to that it feels slightly off. Although I might be imagining it just because it looks different than the normal one...
Browser don't support replacing cursor images natively for obvious reasons. You have to use JavaScript for that.
CSS supports replacing cursor images natively.
In this case it looks like they didn't just want an image though, they wanted the cursor to invert the color of whatever part of the web page it's over, and to seamlessly morph into a selection highlight whenever you mouse over certain controls. Seems like that's a lot harder to make performant.
You can do that by changing the cursor icon for the elements in question. The CSS rule does support per-element swapping (because of course it does, that’s how a text input has a bar but a button has a pointer).
The cursor color inversion can't be done with CSS though.
Use a different colored image.
The background colour of the hovered element is known. When you specify the bgcolor, also override the cursor image.
another thing to block in firefox userContent.css as there doesn't appear to be an option for it in about:config
The only obvious reason I can think of is security concerns (some sort of user confusion), but JS wouldn't help with that. What other reasons are there?
I am so happy this is the top comment.
My experience was...
Skim through sentence after sentence of award-winning inanity like "Expressive design makes you feel something" as my powerful Macbook stumbles and wheezes...
Then think: "I like how default scrolling makes me feel!"
This comment speaks to me on an almost spiritual level. It highlights the fact that it isn't engineering prowess for people to get these jobs.
Yeah it’s kind of weird that “UX” morphed into a non-engineering role. Like, the interface to the user is still part of the software product. It seems like that sort of role would be best executed by the subset of engineers who lean towards visual design, as opposed to the subset of visual designers who lean towards computing.
They had to add that 500ms of input latency to feel like you're really using Android.
I am on Debian linux with 128 GB of ram running the latest brave browser and the cursor lags for me also.
The "beauty" of websites built solely with javascript.
As if they couldn't build an absolutely identical page with just HTML and CSS. But no, javascript is the way for them because it has way more tracking and fingerprinting abilities than plain HTML and CSS.
I've opined about the atrocious announcement pages from Google before (across the board they are offensively sucky), but to give that a rest and speak on-topic about the announcement in question -- good lord what a step back it is, how ugly, insipid, spiritless, and unimpressive it is. Expressive? It's exactly the opposite. Material team, what have you got against shadows, soft bevels, borders, those 2px worth of adornments which carry the weight of gold in terms of communicating clickability, state, different types of buttons, providing instrumental cues and abstraction about everything, why have you failed to learn from UI/UX of the decades behind you?
It's even infecting Flutter, because it wants to push Material. This is genuinely depressing. And makes me appreciate the command of Steve Jobs, the guy leading Stripe, etc. because when you see abysmal offerings like these, you just can't help to.
And it's phenomenally hard to not be judgmental about this, because after release after release it shows they are not learning.
My hot take is that material started with only one goal in mind: we need a visual design vocabulary for mobile but it must absolutely look different from iOS. And by going with this in mind they threw the bath water, the baby, and half of the bathroom
As someone who had a landlord that was a google software engineer, I concur.
OMG I thought it was something wrong on my end, privacy add-on or whatnot. Glad to see they just lost it.
I'm not understanding this comment. I'm running this site on my Pixel 5 and on Firefox on a Thinkpad W530 (12+ years old) and it's flying on both. What part is laggy?
I have an 8 core CPU and a 10 TFLOP GPU and the cursor on this site lags in Firefox but is noticeable smoother in Edge.
It's usable (as in smooth-ish) but still visibly laggy compared to the normal mouse, in Chrome, on my hefty M1 Pro macbook for work.
Also... I fucking hate it. I don't want my mouse to stick to buttons, or to change colors constantly.
The "emotion" the this site generated for me was "anger". If this is the pitch for the new design system, my journey of not using Material is coming to a middle.
Firefox on a mid-range Android phone here and this page didn't even feel particularly heavy to me. Everything loaded before scrolling into view and no stuttering while scrolling whatsoever.
One of the good things that came out of COVID was Google Docs suddenly getting a whole lot better. Why? Because Google engineers finally had to use their tools like the rest of us do, and found out very quickly that Google Docs on normal consumer internet connections sucked.
Google as a company, and in many ways Silicon Valley as a whole, is designed around being a bubble that is ignorant of how the rest of the world actually functions.
Pretty sure Google has used Docs internally since long before COVID.
"used Docs internally" is not the same as:
> on normal consumer internet connections
Oh yeah. One of my pet peeves is that every comms product from Google (say Google Meet) works poorly on a slow internet connection, and slow could be something not bad at all, say 20 Mbps. Zoom, the former Skype, Slack Huddles, Go2Meeting, absolutely every other product has good audio quality and tolerable video quality. With Google products there are dropouts every few seconds so you can't understand what the other people are saying.
I have used Google meet exclusively for a number of years, multiple times a day on the cheapest Internet connection I can buy in my area. It is consistently a better experience then Zoom or Teams.
The only caveat is that the experience is not good on Firefox. Google meet is the only thing I use Chrome/Brave for.
To be fair, if you try to paint something on a webpage that follows the mouse cursor it's gonna be laggy af even in really simple toy examples. The blame may fall more on browsers.
> How did these clowns manage to make my mouse cursor laggy?
FWIW, the link is to basically a glorified demo page _of the design_ of material 3, not a real world implementation of that design. So, that page's performance is not at all reflective of what you'd see when using a relatively recent android app that uses flutter's material components (https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/widgets/material) or one of the many web component libraries that implement MD.
The lag you're noticing is also likely entirely due to their weird cursor behavior. If they simply removed that, I suspect the page's performance wouldn't be at all noticeable.
If the people who came up with this design can not make the demo site performant, site which will be the first impression of your new design language for most, I don't think there is much hope for the rest of us.
But since this has name of Google attached to it, many people will mindless ape it to the detriment of experience of their users.
This page is a promo page of the ux design language people as created by UXD/UXE role people.
It's basically like looking at a Figma export and complaining about the performance of it; any actual implementation would be done for any user-facing products realistically will be entirely unrelated both technologically and organizationally.
I think the people who implement google's html/js/css for random articles aren't particularly connected to engineers working on android/flutter widget performance, and the MUI developers aren't even google employees (mui/flutter being the main implementations of MD AIUI). I'm not at all concerned.
Before I got an iOS phone I thought "why do people care about apps?" I mean, there is an app to get me into my gym but with my Android device it would take about 45 seconds to open so I might as well just give them my phone number. It was always faster to go to a web site or go to the public library or do anything other than wait for an app to open.
Every Material UI library I've seen in existence is a bloated wreck full of bugs. The Angular MUI "flagship" has the worst performance I've ever seen of basic things browsers have supported for decades and CSS does very well for like buttons. Some MUI teams find ways to bring all of Angular's bloat to everywhere else, the React library is awful. I've had to use MudBlazor, the attempt to do MUI things in Blazor, and it is truly awful. Maybe Flutter is an exception, congratulations to Flutter I guess.
This wouldn't be so much of a problem if so many corporations also hadn't somehow decided that MUI was the next Bootstrap and have been treating it as an underlayer in their Design Systems, most of which aren't actually supposed to look like Material and don't really benefit from being huge additional libraries of CSS and components on top of MUI. I blame Figma for this. I don't know that it is any one specific thing Figma is intentionally doing, but the more design teams use Figma the more they seem to think they "need" a safety blanket of Material UI somewhere in the design stack that they won't actually use correctly or well.
As an engineer often tasked with performance work, I hate how much of Material UI's braindead approach to performance reflects on me in ways I can't do anything about "because that is the design system you wanted" (not the design system you needed). I wish Material UI would either get significantly better or just die already.
I tend to agree with your criticisms. FWIW, I do think mui has peaked, at least for greenfield projects. A new wave of tailwind-based libraries are rising fast, the most prominent of which are Mantine and Shadcn. IME, both perform MUCH MUCH better than mui.
You like the Tailwind-based approaches? That's not the direction I would go either. I've never seen anything Tailwind-based not feel bloated. It's such interesting malicious compliance with "no inline-styles" lint rules by just moving the inline styles into the class field. I see the same problems, including variations on the same performance problems, I remember from the bad old jQuery days of everyone just smashing inline styles everywhere all the time that lead to the "no inline-styles" lint rules in the first place.
But I'm a fan of the cascade done right and with CSS Grid and CSS Variables and @layer vanilla CSS cascade is at an all time jam right now. I'd be surprised we aren't seeing more "Design Systems" in that space, but I've got a feeling given how much you can cut from a Bootstrap or Bulma today for CSS Grid/CSS Variables that maybe we aren't seeing a lot happening there simply because not a lot needs to happen there. People happy with the cascade are getting closer and closer to also being happier with "no frameworks" again. Vanilla CSS feels good to work in again.
> You like the Tailwind-based approaches?
There's two ways of answering this, but both amount to a yes
1) I certainly think much more highly of the recent plethora of tailwind based component libraries than the previous generation, which mostly don't require me to actually use tailwind directly (mantine, daisy). Component library developers seem to like it _a lot_, and the outcome is great. If they're happy to use tailwind and I'm happy with the library that is built on top of tailwind, then I'm happy with tailwind.
2) The other way of answering this is if I'm using tailwind directly. To this point, yes, I'm still happy. The metaphor I've used is that tailwind is to css is as ASM is to machine code. It's still low level, but far, far more ergonomic. And in the end, you often end up using a higher level of abstraction anyway (again, see Daisy, mantine).
>Vanilla CSS feels good to work in again.
FWIW, I really do agree with this. But I think tailwind + postcss is even better still.
Checking out the recommendations, out of curiosity, my first things that I notice:
- Mantine doesn't use Tailwind. It's overly React specific for many of its components that don't really need to be React components but could be Vanilla or Web Components, but it doesn't seem to be anything like the Tailwind approach.
- Daisy seems really funny to me because it seems the long way around to be a Vanilla CSS framework while still being too much Tailwind.
- (ShadCN is definitely the worst of both above things, utterly React-specific and taking the long way around from Tailwind back to things that resemble Vanilla CSS, only with extra React for React's sake)
Not just the technical aspect here. I read through the page and nothing of any measurable importance was stated. What problems did this solve? What benefits does this bring to users? I guess I was expecting more from Google. The initial Material design system made some good points and addressed some issues for UI design. This just seems unfocused.
It comes across as AI-generated diarrhea, without any point. Maybe I am just too dumb to recognize talent?
Confirmed. It felt OK on my M1 Max laptop but on my 2019 Intel laptop it feels like laggy shit. This is the stuff that makes you want to quit programming and go pick berries in the woods.
The update to Android 15 was TERRIBLE. I updated it the past days, it's literally a bootleg copy of iOS interface. I despise it so much, much more than the move from Material Design to Material You. Everything occupies so much space, there is less information available for you, and important things like changing the music in your lock screen is confined to a tiny space.
At least they got the Expressive right in the name now, Material Expressive (HATE).
Every update is worse than the last. I did the same, and I'm particularly loving turning bluetooth on or off requiring a swipe and three button presses instead of one. And I thought the quick settings regressed in 14 when they went from icons to huge buttons, but now they've gone for less-huge buttons with always-truncated text in.
At least with Windows it alternately gets much worse then a bit better again with each version.
Regarding the monstrosity in the link, yes it does make me 'feel things' - things I will refrain from typing out lest they be construed as threatening behaviour.
You can say a lot about Android 15, but I have a Pixel and an iPhone 16 Pro and they do not look alike... at all? Pull down the notifications and quick settings, it does not look remotely like iOS. The same for all the native apps.
I wonder if you have Samsung One UI 7 or some other skin. One UI 7 looks a lot more like iOS, but there is little Google can do about that?
If you try to move the mouse while scrolling the cursor freezes... jfc bring back 2010's Google.
Wow, yeah just tested that and it's really bad. I guess it's a strange thing to do, but a good way to test how the cursor hijacking code gets stalled when scroll is active, and I'm guessing they're doing UI updates on scroll so the thread is getting thrashed there.
Even just making a circle motion with a mouse produces a lot of stuttering. I just did the same action on HN and it's as smooth as you'd expect on a CPU from 1995 and beyond.
I only came here to rant about how no one should mess with my mouse cursor.
I'm with you there.
People complain about how crap UX is now, and how computer illiterate the general populace has become but I firmly place the blame on forcing the web into an application delivery platform, abandoning all operating system HIG and conventions so that every app is now it's own unique snowflake that breaks conventions.
IMO people would struggle less if it was all native apps that followed the OS. You learn your operating system's conventions and shortcuts, and those translate into every app you run - but then marketing people got their hands in things, and suddenly everything had to be branded and unique, and we are worse off for it.
> How did these clowns manage to make my mouse cursor laggy?
The lag and that cursor makes it feel like trying to type with mittens on.
You are just part of the problem. In which companies do engineers still have the final say? Almost none.
At almost all the companies I’ve worked with engineers might not have the final say but they’re still on the hook for blatant performance issues
Why does everything reek of late capitalism? Even design doesn't fail to emanate a distinct "dystopian megacorp" stench.
This is classic enshittification. Make poor software to nudge people into buy new hardware supposedly handling it better. Rinse and repeat.
Also shittier software means you can hire cheaper workers to plough on.
It's because the developers have extremely fast and graphics accelerated hardware. I can't notice any lag whatsoever on the mouse cursor on my M2 Pro but.. But a lot of folks won't have top end HW.
m1 pro using firefox, I can notice the cursor not being smooth, and if I move the mouse while scrolling then it lags hard
I have no cursor lag and I'm on a 2019 Intel MBP.
[Ticket Closed] resolution: user should buy a macbook pro with at least the M3 processor
/s
SecOps put CrowdStrike's Falcon and Windows Defender on our Macs so we'd have about 20% CPU left for our actual dev work. That's not an exaggeration, staring at the System Monitor is all you can do when everything is locked up.
The Android emulator sucks the remainder with ease. The app performs better on a low end Android burner phone then our dev machines so at least we know our users are having a reasonable experience.
You just triggered some PTSD... years ago I had to send my CTO a recording of my screen with keyboard input lag on VSCode because CrowdStrike was eating up all my CPU.
I asked him if it was a good use of my (expensive) time to wait 30 seconds for characters to appear on my code editor.
Luckily he gave me a "special exemption" that allowed me to shut that monstrosity down !
It's so bad with my work laptop that I find myself doing work on my personal laptop and git patching it on my work laptop.
Also doesn't help that because I don't feel comfortable with all the monitoring software on my work laptop, I won't use the services I personally pay for with my work browser because I don't want the IT department scraping my personal passwords.
I had a couple of customers that deployed 7 endpoint security tools of the "hook into processes and inspect everything" variety. The exact mix was customer-specific, but if you're wondering what that looks like:
* Stand-alone "best of breed" endpoint DLP
* Stand-alone "best of breed" EDR
* Process whitelisting tool
* NAC posture assessment agent
* Three different AV agents
This is not even counting their VPN client(s) or the third party disk encryption agent they used.
I marveled at how they even got all of the agents to coexist, let alone have enough CPU left for people to do their jobs.
And after all that, your company gets hacked through a misconfigured router.
> And after all that, your company gets hacked through a misconfigured router.
Or a more likely scenario - some dev with admin on their machine grabs a malicious NPM package, EDR doesn't grab it because they successfully lobbied to have certain directories exempt for performance reasons (like DevDrive on Windows, or WSL). SSH keys get stolen, and despite all the fancy security products, the environment is still a mess (which is why there's so many products to cover up that fact) so the dev actually has keys to prod, then you're hosed.
I've seen my fair share of orgs with a plethora of security "solutions" and yet fail to understand some basic principles like least privilege or separation of concerns and think all their security software is going to save them.
Or one of the seven endpoint agents, each of which has a kernel module and at least half of which are doing dodgy process injection and read process memory shenanigans.
By calling them engineers you're only feeding the ego.
Any idiot can build a page that loads, but it takes an engineer to build a page that barely loads.
Next time I'll be ranting against overengineering, I'll be stealing that :D
The mouse cursor / general performance complaint is valid but:
> spend zero brainpower on systems without graphics acceleration.
These systems don't exist unless you go out of your way to turn off graphics acceleration. In which case that's kinda on you. It's like ranting about sites requiring javascript. It's just not a realistic expectation to have of anything anymore.
> In which case that's kinda on you.
What if I turned it off because it makes my machine more stable? Why do I have to choose between crashing and jank?
What on earth are you running that has such a bad GPU driver that it can't handle chrome/firefox, yet also is so niche that they don't have driver workarounds for it?
> What on earth are you running that has such a bad GPU driver that it can't handle chrome/firefox, yet also is so niche that they don't have driver workarounds for it?
Fun fact, for the longest time ever on Windows 10 the Intel Arc drivers for A580 and B580 would crash in Edge if you played some videos on YouTube, it did seem that switching the ANGLE backend or whatever it was called would help, though I got similar issues with VLC when it was using the DirectX based renderer whereas OpenGL renderer didn't have that issue but would make the mouse disappear when in the video window.
A lot of it feels like it was solved after moving to Windows 11, though it's still possible to make the PC freeze by either doing encodes in AV1 in DaVinci Resolve (QuickTime H264 or maybe H265 doesn't seem to have the issue) or through Handbrake, if the GPU is at 100% for prolonged periods of time, whereas recording with OBS or playing pretty much any game doesn't have that sort of an issue.
Might be a bad media chip or something else, go figure - definitely there's at least two people in the world who might benefit from disabling hardware acceleration in some cases, though. My RX 580 doesn't seem to have the issue, so that's the joys of being an early adopter.
I don't know. It says ThinkPad on top. It was provided by my employer.
Edit: Not directly related, but I turned off DRM support for similar reasons. Web sites keep turning one of my monitors off when that's enabled. Even though I'm not intentionally or perceptibly playing any media. The (well, another) weird thing is the other monitor stays on. They're the same brand and model, using the same cable.
Fancy hardware stuff seems to make browsers unstable, and in my experience this has been true for over a decade. I don't care enough about to try to find a root cause. I don't need DRM support or hardware acceleration for anything I intended to do, so I just turn off anything like that.