Browser support

The short answer

Use Chrome, or a Chromium-based browser such as Edge or Brave, on a desktop operating system, over HTTPS.

Why Chrome

Chrome is what Quasar is developed and validated against. Three things depend on it specifically:

• Keyboard Lock, which routes Escape to the game rather than to the browser, is Chromium-only.
• Codec behaviour is measured against Chrome’s decoders. The rules Quasar applies about what your device can decode are derived from Chrome’s actual behaviour.
• The Gamepad API implementation differences matter for controller support.

Firefox and Safari are not tested. Parts may work. Nothing is promised, and problems on them are not going to be diagnosable against any known-good baseline.

HTTPS is not optional

Three features require a secure context, which in practice means HTTPS:

Feature	Without HTTPS
Gamepad support	Controllers are not detected.
Keyboard Lock	Escape leaves fullscreen instead of reaching the game.
Microphone	Cannot be enabled.

The default deployment generates a self-signed certificate and serves HTTPS on port 8443. Accepting the browser warning once is enough to get a secure context. See HTTPS and certificates.

Codecs, and what your browser can actually decode

Quasar measures your browser’s decode capability when you log in and stores it against that device. It will not send you something you cannot play.

The rules that come out of this:

H.264 works everywhere. It is the guaranteed floor, and every quality tier ends in an H.264 rung.

AV1 works everywhere Chrome runs, because Chrome ships a software decoder (dav1d) as a fallback. It costs a few milliseconds of extra decode time without hardware support, which is usually a good trade for the bandwidth it saves.

HEVC is the awkward one. Chrome only decodes HEVC when the operating system provides hardware decode for it, and it has no software fallback. In practice that means:

Client OS	HEVC
macOS	Almost always works.
Windows	Usually works, depending on the GPU.
Linux	Effectively never.

This is Chrome’s own gating, not something Quasar can work around. If HEVC is unavailable to you, Quasar skips it and uses the next rung down. You do not get a black screen, you get a different codec.

H.264 High profile does not decode in any browser

Browser sessions are clamped to constrained-baseline H.264 regardless of which GPU encoded it. This is a browser limitation on both AMD and NVIDIA and it is handled automatically. It is one of the reasons a native client is on the roadmap.

Mobile and tablets

A touch device gets an on-screen menu button in place of the keyboard shortcut, and touch input is forwarded. It works. Whether a given game is playable with touch input is a different question, and mostly the answer is no unless you pair a controller.

Nothing to install

There is no launcher, no browser extension and no client binary. A native client is planned for the latency the browser’s jitter buffer costs, but the browser is the only client today.