The hardware with the issue is the acer 522 netbook, it has an amd c-50 apu that will decode 1080p no problem.
flash used to work great on firefox and chrome around the 11.3 era, I remember when amd had to issue a driver to enable the video accel but since ~11.7 firefox and chrome are dropping frames and eating tonnes of cpu cycles [on a netbook where flash has become too costly]. the solution seems to just use IE but it is terribly insecure and all my history is in firefox and chrome [which used to work].
Main issue is youtube. ff/chrome will drop frames at 480p and up while IE10 wont even sweat 1080p30. Even using the same version IE gets better results. Also this is true for windows 7 and 8.
all three are using the same version[chrome might not be] but are using different apis, pepper, netscape, active-x[off the top of my head] so I doubt the interface is the issue...anyone have any ideas?