Unix and Linux → Playing with Raspberry Pi 2, and have some questions

Hi,
I'm running two distributions of Linux on a couple of Raspberry Pi 2's, and have a few questions.

1) Chromium installs decently, but seems to disappear sometimes when closing a tab (totally closes, task manager shows it's gone).

2) Google tells me to upgrade to Chrome, but there doesn't seem to be an ARM 7 variant of Chrome.

3) While many things play without flash, some things still need it. I installed pepper flash, which seems to be from Google. It plays audio decently, but frame rates for video are an atrocity. Is there any flash player substitute that runs video at all well on this system?

Mostly I'm concerned with youtube. I'm not bound to any browser or even flash, I just want to be able to play most videos without grief. The GPU seems weak compared to the CPU's.

Overall the system seems like a decent value. Lack of UPnP or something similar is also annoying. My TV had a very weak resolution and took a bit of effort to modify config files to change. So far, I can't locate ARM 7 Brother printer drivers for my MFC.

Internet access, and function has been very good aside from weak overall video and particularly flash based video performance. On Kodi the same hardware seems to fly and handles 1080 resolution with no grief. I don't understand how Kodi can get great resolution easily while flash is running at a frame or two a second on youtube.

flash doesn't use gpu, kodi does...

Google always self-promotes that. I use user JavaScript to rip that crap out of the page, or if I have Stylish, make it invisible. Their attitude is kind of like:

»dilbert.com/strip/1995-06-24

s/better computer/better browser/

ROFL, that was a great link. Thanks.

There are a few Raspberry Pi browsers that support html5 pretty well, and using one of them, go to »www.youtube.com/html5 and tell Google you want YouTube to use the HTML5 player wherever possible. (Obviously it sets a cookie or something, so you have to do that for each browser.) The page also lists the HTML5 elements that the browser does and doesn't support.

Which browser would work with HTML 5 on the Raspberry Pi 2?

I don't have the pi in front of me but I believe I successfully used epiphany-browser and chromium and mozilla-firefox. (Not that I recommend either of the latter on an older Pi for daily use because they are so big.) The web site is pretty helpful, so visit it with any browser, and if the HTML5 viewer doesn't work, it probably already wasn't working due to the lack of Flash anyway. It allows you to turn the feature on OR off.

Pandora:

Have you looked at how things run with Raspbian? I know the Foundation has done a lot to make sure the Graphics are optimized for GPU on that build.

There are also a couple (I think two) codec licenses that you may consider purchasing from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

»www.raspberrypi.com/lice ··· se-keys/

Those may also help them hardware decode some of the stuff you are dealing with.

Good Luck!
KA0OUV [Tim]