The State of GPU Acceleration in Firefox for Linux

One of the biggest features coming to Mozilla’s Firefox 4.0 Web browser is the ability to take advantage of your PC’s graphics card in order to accelerate the Web. At the least, page rendering can be heavily sped up, and if you are a heavy browser, that’s something that would be noticeable right off the bat. Fortunately for Windows and Mac users, support will be ready when 4.0 final gets released, but what about Linux?

Last week, OSNews noticed that Linux GPU-acceleration support was not mentioned in the beta 9 release notes, while it was mentioned for Windows XP through to 7, along with Mac OS X. So what’s the deal? It turns out that the lacking feature has everything to do with the instability that Linux’s graphics drivers are known for. Ouch!

Since the post was made, Mozilla ended up re-implementing Linux GPU acceleration, but it requires a “whitelisted” driver, which in this case is essentially a current proprietary NVIDIA driver. It seems that both the open-sourced variants of AMD’s, Intel’s and NVIDIA’s drivers, along with the proprietary versions of both AMD’s and Intel’s drivers, just don’t cut it.

As a long-time Linux user, this news doesn’t surprise me, and it surprises me even less thanks to the fact that GPU drivers are one of the major complaints I am often given when people complain about Linux. All too often, a driver can crash an application or the X server entirely, and for seemingly no good reason.

I’m happy to report that in the past year, I’ve had no such problems with NVIDIA’s graphics drivers, and I’ve found them to be rock-solid in almost every way. I used to have horrible experiences with AMD’s drivers, but even those have been majorly improved in the past year alone. Still, when a GPU-related feature is dropped from a major application, it’s kind of a blunt hint that things need to be done. Both AMD and NVIDIA, and even Intel, have active Linux developers, but things need to be amped up so that Linux is never pushed to the side when it comes to cool technologies like GPU acceleration.

Boris Zbarsky, long-time Mozilla developer, commented on the issue over at Hacks.Mozilla.org. The release notes for Firefox 4.0 beta 9 noted that it comes with hardware acceleration for Windows 7 and Vista via a combination of Direct2D, DirectX 9 and DirectX 10. Windows XP users will also enjoy hardware acceleration for many operations “using our new Layers infrastructure along with DX9”. Furthermore, Mac OS X has excellent OpenGL support, they claim, so they’ve got that covered as well.