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Ramblings Before I Tell You Anything Useful
Over the past few months I've been on and off trying out new browsers. For the most part, I needed something good for not just YouTube and Facebook, but browser games too. Wanted to cover my bases. I've of course tried three most well known browsers (Chrome, Edge, and Firefox), and even some other more niche ones like Waterfox and Pale Moon. I ended up deciding Vivaldi was my best fit, as I wanted to have some privacy of not submitting my data to the Great Google Overlords, and I still wanted to stick with the performance and security of a Chromium-based browser.
Vivaldi and other Chromium-based browsers on the whole, as you may know, have access to a variety of semi-hidden experimental settings. On Chrome, by going to the URL "chrome://flags" (will redirect to "vivaldi://flags," in Vivaldi's case), you can access a decent assortment of more in-progress bells and whistles. Now sure, some of these can and often will break things, but many can noticeably improve your quality of life. If you have your browser generally feel sluggish in your games or video streams stutter a bit too much when initially buffering, these can help alleviate it when configured properly.
Disclaimers
Of course not all computers can benefit from these settings. Most of these settings utilize your computer's graphical capabilities. If you're running an integrated GPU (i.e. a prebuilt office dell from 2010 with no dedicated graphics card installed), you could potentially have worse performance. Additionally, while I only tested this on my GTX 1050 Ti, other GPUs and even other graphics driver versions may experience "quirks." Things like flickering during video playback, videos refusing to play, or even having a totally black window when toggling Chrome's full screen mode are potential issues.
These unintended behaviors are why many of these settings are off by default. If any of these issues happen to you, be sure to read the "In Case of S**t-Hitting-The-Fan" section.
In Case of S**t-Hitting-The-Fan
Worried changing any of these flags will make your browser have irreversible issues? Don't! We can always reset the flags to their defaults by clicking the "Reset all" button in the top right.
Everyone's hardware has the potential to be different. What works for some computers may not do so hot on another. Due to this, Chromium has a handy "Reset all" button on top of the experimental features page. Click it, it'll reset your flags to their defaults, and close + relaunch your browser. Then you'll be using the same settings as before we changed anything.
Actually Useful Bits
Now, running with the ideas of improving buffering and gaming performance, I'll be running down a list of some experimental features that I've since found beneficial:
- Override software rendering list (#ignore-gpu-blocklist) - Changed to "Enabled"
- Select HW overlay strategies (#overlay-strategies) - Change to "None"
- GPU rasterization (#enable-gpu-rasterization) - Changed to "Enabled"
- Zero-copy rasterizer (#enable-zero-copy) - Changed to "Enabled"
- Choose ANGLE graphics backend (#use-angle) - Changed to "OpenGL"
- Out-of-process 2D canvas rasterization (#canvas-oop-rasterization) - Changed to "Enabled"
Bonus Ducks
Lastly, here's a couple I found useful generally, but didn't necessarily speed up my games or streams:
- Anonymize local IPs exposed by WebRTC (#enable-webrtc-hide-local-ips-with-mdns) - Changed to "Enabled"
- Experimental QUIC protocol (#enable-quic) - "Changed to Enabled"
- Parallel downloading (#enable-parallel-downloading) - Changed to "Enabled"
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