697929 - Dropped video frames are FAR worse in Firefox

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[brainout1]

Attachment: DroppedFrames.jpg

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:7.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/7.0.1
Build ID: 20110928134238

Steps to reproduce:

Ran this in Youtube:  http://www.youtube.com/my_speed# .  I'm on the fastest DSL speed allowed by Centurylink.  Have been troubleshooting with Amazon since July due to video cutoff, also did it with Centurylink, and was told by Amazon Instant Video that the problem is DROPPED frames.  The Youtube link there has a Video test link at the bottom, which when you click it, a video appears.  Its upper left window shows streaming and dropped frames.  When I ran this with IE8, there were only 10 dropped frames within the first few minutes.  With Google Chrome, the same thing (Chrome is stripped of all addons, but IE8 has many).  With Firefox, there were over 1000 dropped frames within 35 seconds.

This happens both with and without addons disabled.


Actual results:

Videos hang, especially in the faster-feeding Amazon Instant Video.  Youtube, less so.  This has ALWAYS been my gripe with Firefox, and you've seen that Youtube gripe many times before.  But it's worse now, at the higher DSL speed.

Am on Firefox 7, and all the plugins are updated, including Flash.  Have flushed cache, cleared recent history, played different Global and other Settings with Adobe, have selectively and collectively disabled addons.. none of it makes any difference.

Amazon Instant Video only runs 10 minutes before going into a disconnect and hang.  Century link says my system is fine at its end, DirectX reports all things are working, and Firefox reports all things go except it wants me to update the Graphics Driver Radeon X300 to version 10.6+  (ATI Catalyst latest version is 11+); which I did, but Firefox can't tell I've done it.

Firefox is just plain sluggish.  It worked, in version 3.  It's not worked well, since.


Expected results:

No frames should have dropped, obviously.  Screenshot of the link playing live, showing over 1000 dropped frames, attached.