1. Most Linux distros install Firefox by default while very few install Chromium, so I suspect that most Linux users use Firefox (even though Chrome is far more popular in general).
2. On Fedora, openSUSE, and similar distros, the Mesa in the main repos is built without h264 hardware decoding support, so no applications will be able to use hardware decoding unless you run some terminal commands. That being said, the more user-friendly distros tend to have this enabled by default.
3. Chromium doesn't officially support hardware decoding on Linux at all [0], whereas Firefox does. (Hardware decoding still works, it's just not officially supported.)
4. Up until a few months ago [1], you had to start Chromium with some special flags [2] to enable hardware decoding.
5. Hardware decoding should be enabled in Firefox by default, so those "about:config" flags for Firefox that I mentioned above shouldn't be necessary in most cases, but since it wasn't working for the OP, I suggested those flags to force-enable it. (A few years ago, hardware decoding would crash occasionally, and Firefox automatically disables it if it has ever crashed in the past before. It's super stable now, but old installations will often have it disabled due to bugs that were fixed years ago.)
Sorry, my earlier posts were all talking about hardware decoding, so I had assumed that it was implied that I was talking about hardware decoding in this reply too. But I see that I never actually mentioned that anywhere, so my bad.
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Not if you install Chrome, Brave, Vivaldi, etc... like most users...
1. Most Linux distros install Firefox by default while very few install Chromium, so I suspect that most Linux users use Firefox (even though Chrome is far more popular in general).
2. On Fedora, openSUSE, and similar distros, the Mesa in the main repos is built without h264 hardware decoding support, so no applications will be able to use hardware decoding unless you run some terminal commands. That being said, the more user-friendly distros tend to have this enabled by default.
3. Chromium doesn't officially support hardware decoding on Linux at all [0], whereas Firefox does. (Hardware decoding still works, it's just not officially supported.)
4. Up until a few months ago [1], you had to start Chromium with some special flags [2] to enable hardware decoding.
5. Hardware decoding should be enabled in Firefox by default, so those "about:config" flags for Firefox that I mentioned above shouldn't be necessary in most cases, but since it wasn't working for the OP, I suggested those flags to force-enable it. (A few years ago, hardware decoding would crash occasionally, and Firefox automatically disables it if it has ever crashed in the past before. It's super stable now, but old installations will often have it disabled due to bugs that were fixed years ago.)
[0]: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs...
[1]: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40225939#comment67
[2]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Chromium#Hardware_video_acc...
So moving goalposts... Normies don't care about hardware decoding, they care that the thing plays.
Also Windows doesn't have 100% codec coverage either: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/develop/media...
Hence Chrome and others shipping codecs...
Sorry, my earlier posts were all talking about hardware decoding, so I had assumed that it was implied that I was talking about hardware decoding in this reply too. But I see that I never actually mentioned that anywhere, so my bad.