Submission + - No Hardware Acceleration Firefox for Linux (osnews.com) 4
devtty writes: Yesterday, the ninth Firefox 4.0 beta was released. One of the major new features in Firefox 4.0 is hardware acceleration for anything from canvas drawing to video rendering. Sadly, this feature won't make its way to the Linux version of Firefox 4.0. The reason? X' drivers are "disastrously buggy". 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.
No mention of Linux, and there's a reason for that. "We tried enabling OpenGL on Linux, and discovered that most Linux drivers are so disastrously buggy (think 'crash the X server at the drop of a hat, and paint incorrectly the rest of the time' buggy) that we had to disable it for now," explains Zbarsky, "Heck, we're even disabling WebGL for most Linux drivers, last I checked..."
No mention of Linux, and there's a reason for that. "We tried enabling OpenGL on Linux, and discovered that most Linux drivers are so disastrously buggy (think 'crash the X server at the drop of a hat, and paint incorrectly the rest of the time' buggy) that we had to disable it for now," explains Zbarsky, "Heck, we're even disabling WebGL for most Linux drivers, last I checked..."
