player started stuttering some weeks ago

[wothke]

user report “G A WILLIAMS”
from 26.8.2024: “Sound suddenly started stuttering badly in Chrome, works fine in Firefox“
from 27.8.2024: “Actually Firefox seems to be stuttering too, Edge works best“
from 29.8.2024: “I think it’s something to do with the number of search results being displayed as a track plays. I was just listening to one song after searching for its name specifically and it seemed to play fine, but when I made a broader search as the song was playing in the background it started lagging (scrolling through those results might exacerbate it also but I’m not sure). Strange as this never used to happen, although now I think about it before this started happening (probably a few weeks ago) I noticed the player would aggressive stutter/lag for a second (but then go back to normal) every time I made a search as a track was playing (as the results loaded) or when I accidentally clicked on one of the star ratings as it loaded up the notification box, and I don’t know if that was a precursor to this but that also never used to happen. And again Edge works fine (although the stuttering for a second thing also occurs there)“

[wothke]

note: seems unlikely that the “song skipping” functionality added in playMOD on July 11, 2024 has anything to do with such changed behavior and the last change before that dates back to 2023. The only thing that comes to mind on the PlayMOD side is the changed default for the “Frequency Spectrum Output” user setting which might push a slow device to its limits.

Problem might also be caused by something that the Chrome/Firefox morons broke with some update in their respective browers. Or maybe the user recently added some plugin that interfers with the page? I cannot reproduce the problem on my machine and without any context information provided by the user there is no base for further inverstigations at the point.