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What Are the Best Firefox Settings to Make YouTube Run Smoother in 2025?
If you use Firefox to watch videos, you might notice YouTube runs slower than on other browsers. This happens because some big websites don’t always test how well their pages work on Firefox. Sometimes they even make changes that hurt performance on purpose.
The good news? You can fix this yourself right now. Two simple settings can make YouTube work much better on your Firefox browser. Both changes are safe and take less than five minutes.
Turn On WebRender Layer Compositor
This feature makes Firefox smarter about what it updates on your screen. Instead of redrawing everything when something moves, it only updates the parts that changed. Here’s what you get:
- Smoother scrolling through web pages
- Videos play without stuttering
- Better battery life on laptops
- Faster loading on sites with lots of content
Steps to enable it:
- Type about:config in the Firefox address bar.
- Click the button that says you’ll be careful.
- Search for WebRender Layer Compositor.
- Click to turn it to True.
- Restart your browser.
AMD Graphics Card Users Need This Too
If your computer has an AMD graphics card, make one more change. This setting helps your computer’s processor work less hard when playing videos.
How to do it:
- Open about:config again.
- Search for media.wmf.zero-copy-nv12-textures-force-enabled.
- Switch it to True.
- Restart Firefox.
Still Having Problems? Try This Last Fix
Some older computers struggle with the AV1 video format that YouTube uses. Turning it off makes YouTube use VP9 instead, which often runs faster on older machines.
Quick steps:
- Go to about:config.
- Find media.av1.enabled.
- Set it to False.
- Restart Firefox and test YouTube.
These changes work on the current version of Firefox, so you don’t need to wait for updates. Try them one at a time to see which ones help your computer the most.