14 DAY TRIAL // Interestingly enough, days after Google complained about the state of old graphics card drivers and how its affecting the hardware acceleration features in Chrome, Mozilla is now doing the same, highlighting the fact that many drivers are blacklisted due to instability.
"Firefox 4 brings many new features in the Graphics department, notably hardware acceleration and WebGL. However, when we turned these features on by default in nightly builds around September last year, and then in Beta 7, crash statistics and bug reports quickly showed that bugs in graphics drivers were often making these features misbehave," Mozilla's Benoit Jacob wrote.
This is exactly what Google described and the same kind of problems it had with Chrome and hardware acceleration. No surprise then that Mozilla took the same approach.
"We reacted by selectively disabling these new features on buggy drivers, based on the large amounts of information collected by beta testers. Of course, Firefox remains fully functional: only these new features get disabled," he explained.
Mozilla maintains a full list of compatible drivers, but the best way of ensuring that your browser can handle WebGL and all the hardware acceleration features are enabled, is to use a recent driver for your graphics card.
Just in case you want to make sure that your driver is supported, you can check out Mozilla's Blocked Graphics Drivers list. It contains all of the supported cards and driver versions and also details what features work on what platforms.
Since things like hardware acceleration depend very much on the operating system, neither Mozilla or Google can guarantee that all related features work on all supported versions of Windows, Mac OS and Linux.
If your drivers or card is blacklisted, you can still force enable WebGL if you think it may work despite the block. Go to about:config in Firefox 4.0, search for "webgl.force-enabled" and set it to "true." Other blocked features can be similarly overridden. [via DownloadSquad]