I've been implementing my own file hosting / streaming platform and managed that my solution performs a lot better in Chrome compared to Firefox. Of course the actual dow… (read more)
I've been implementing my own file hosting / streaming platform and managed that my solution performs a lot better in Chrome compared to Firefox. Of course the actual download speed is the same, but it seems firefox buffers a much larger byte range before starting to play the video compared to chrome.
For example, the first screenshot shows network traffic in Firefox between opening the page until the second the video starts playing. As you can see, Firefox loads 346.58 MB of data in 19.01 seconds (including one 326.70 MB range request for bytes 19365888-5071292588/5071292589) before the video starts playing. This results in almost 1 minute of video to be buffered before playback begins.
Whereas in chrome, the video starts almost immediately after only buffering smaller byte ranges (as shown in the second screenshot). What's interesting is that chrome seems to request the entire rest of the video immediately after but keeps streaming the received bytes instead of waiting for the entire range request to complete, so the last request in the third screenshot just keeps growing in size while the video plays.
I was wondering if there's something I could tweak on my end or if this is something that could be improved in Firefox. It seems odd that Firefox buffers such large chunks of videos before playback begins.