It turns out the solution for me was to forget about Chrome and Chromium altogether, and merely tweak Firefox’s configuration.
To backtrack: While Firefox will play Netflix for me, it is very jumpy and hard to watch. And with Chrome it was perfect. So I wondered if I could watch Netflix on the open source Chromium browser–which seems to possible in Linux Arch but insanely difficult in Ubuntu based Linux.
The solution came in Aquil Roshan’s recent article on Mozilla Firefox (See it’sFOSS blog.)
So If you’re having trouble with streaming quality in Firefox try this:
In a blank location bar type: “about:config”. You’ll get a warning screen (charmingly about dragons!) and when you proceed a very long list of variables.
Scroll down to “layers.acceleration.force-enabled” and set the value to “true”.
I’m now officially one step closer to being Google-free!