Chapter 7 - Install and configure the browser¶

In this chapter, you will install and configure the browser on your Raspberry Pi to display the BeeScreens applications.

Chromium, the open source version of Google Chrome, will be installed and configured. In the past, Firefox was used but it was replaced by Chromium because it was more stable and had better performances regarding hardware acceleration.

Steps¶

Install Chromium¶

Raspberry Pi OS offers two Chromium packages: chromium and chromium-browser. The chromium-browser is the one maintained by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and has various patches to enable hardware acceleration. It is the one that you will use.

Install the chromium-browser package:

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sudo apt install --yes chromium-browser rpi-chromium-mods

Configure Chromium¶

Chromium must be configured in order to start correctly on Wayland and enable all the hardware acceleration features.

Start by creating the configuration directory for Chromium.

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# Create the configuration directories
mkdir --parent ~/.config/chromium

Create the .config/chromium/Local State file.

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# Create the configuration file for chromium
tee .config/chromium/Local\ State > /dev/null <<"EOT"
{
	"browser": {
		"enabled_labs_experiments": [
			"canvas-oop-rasterization@1",
			"enable-drdc@1",
			"enable-gpu-rasterization@1",
			"enable-raw-draw@1",
			"enable-zero-copy@1",
			"ozone-platform-hint@3"
		]
	}
}
EOT

This file will enable all the required features for Chromium to run on Wayland and enable hardware acceleration.

All these features can be enabled when starting Chromium from the command line but it is easier to enable them by default. This will ensure Chromium can be started from Wofi as well.

Start Chromium¶

If you haven't already, start Sway.

Start Wofi with Win+D and select Chromium.

Chromium should start.

Validate Chromium has hardware acceleration enabled¶

You can check that all the required features are enabled by opening the chrome://flags page.

You can validate that Chromium has hardware acceleration enabled by opening the chrome://gpu page.

The output of the page should look like this:

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Graphics Feature Status

- Canvas: Hardware accelerated
- Canvas out-of-process rasterization: Enabled
- Direct Rendering Display Compositor: Disabled
- Compositing: Hardware accelerated
- Multiple Raster Threads: Enabled
- OpenGL: Enabled
- Rasterization: Hardware accelerated on all pages
- Raw Draw: Enabled
- Video Decode: Hardware accelerated
- Video Encode: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
- Vulkan: Disabled
- WebGL: Hardware accelerated
- WebGL2: Hardware accelerated
- WebGPU: Disabled

Summary¶

Congrats! You have successfully installed and configured Chromium on your Raspberry Pi with hardware acceleration enabled. This will allow you to run the BeeScreens applications on your Raspberry Pi.