Do you mean that you could view YouTube in the current version of GNOME Web, which is also known as Epiphany, on the preinstalled version of the operating system? Mine in PureOS Byzantium is currently on version 40.2 with WebKitGTK 2.46.6 and libsoup 2.72.0. Those components are too out-of-date. It does not play YouTube videos at all for me. Some other websites are also broken. It is OK for casual browsing. But I doubt that it is secure.
Good point. The internals of the Firefox ESR version in the apt repository are probably more up-to-date than those for GNOME Web. It shows version 128.8.0, which seems to be the latest ESR release version at the moment.
I have decided to give Flatpak another try and installed the latest release of GNOME Web, which is currently 48, from GNOME Nightly. It consistently plays YouTube videos, including full screen, and other sites work too. I perceive an extra pause between frames, which is somewhat distracting and nearly jarring. YouTube defaults to 480p but 720p plays the same. When started in terminal, the browser probes for Vulcan. If Vulcan were available, could the result be better?
The actual view resolution of a YouTube video is reported by “Stats for Nerds” to be 640x360*2.00 despite the resolution of the video being streamed. I assume that it is due to the default scaling in the Phosh compositor on Librem 5. It reduces the resolution available for displaying. I wonder whether it is possible to disable it somehow to skip unnecessary conversion. Could it improve the video playback?
It makes sense considering that both are Google products. They ought to work well together. There appears to be a version of Chromium in Fedora Flatpaks, but I have not looked closer into it yet.