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Why Linux Loses Out On Hardware Acceleration In Firefox
devtty writes with some bad news for Linux users, from OSNews: "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...'" An update to the story softens this news slightly, saying that "hardware acceleration (OpenGL only) on Linux has been implemented, but due to bugs and issues, only one driver so far has been whitelisted (the proprietary NVIDIA driver)."
They're not wrong.
Until graphics card manufacturers take Linux seriously, these problems are always going to occur. That's why it's stupid to use the argument that OpenGL is better than D3D because it's cross-platform. It's only cross-platform insofar as there is actually an implementation on Linux. After that, I'm wondering if it's better to use D3D and Wine instead of native GL!
This is pretty much why I always buy nvidia. Others may be catching up gradually, but nvidia has been consistent leader for as long as I can remember. Probably because they use the same codebase for windows and linux driver.
Nvidia's lead may disapper when Linux world starts moving over to Wayland though, as it appears Nvidia is not interested in doing a Wayland driver.
There are plenty of games that would be a bother to play via wine were it not for the Nvidia drivers. Thats why for more than 8 years I've installed nothing but Geforce video boards on most desktops, sad as it may be.
the drivers are not mature. I don't see the news as a bad thing, many bugs were discovered and will be fixed. When kde 4 came out many driver bugs were exposed and resolved. In the end of the day linux users will have a more stable and less buggy platform.
Even the nvidia drivers aren't the cream of on the top, they're buggy in their own right. And as for the OSX OpenGL drivers, well, let's summarize:
- OSX OpenGL drivers are horribly outdated and wrought with funny bugs
- Windows OpenGL drivers are practically non existent
- Linux OpenGL drivers depend on Nvidia proprietary blobs and a user who's gone some lengths to get the latest driver
That being said, I'm the author of Lithosphere, which runs just fine on windows, osx and linux. Sure, the driver situation's horrible, but it is not your problem really. Failing to write a stable OpenGL app with a working driver has nothing to do with crappy drivers. It has to do with being crappy at OpenGL programming.
Experiments and other stuff
Linux video acceleration might not be great, but neither is mozilla's commitment. It wasn't all that long ago when firefox under wine run faster than native on linux.
I think that if firefox on windows would had used open gl instead of directx, wine would have had a pretty good chance of running of running it regardless of video hardware manufacturer.
This conclusion matches the observation of the kwin developers who are brave enough to use GLSL for desktop effects
http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2010/09/driver-dilemma-in-kde-workspaces-4-5/
Without citations to back it up, the response of some open source devs was, IIRC: The KWin guys don't understand open source. They are meant to get in touch with the driver developers and help getting the bugs resolved, preferable send patches. The clutter developers i.e. sent patches to solve driver problems.
IIRC, the mentioned contribution from clutter devs to the graphics drivers were made by Red Hat employees, which heavily backs the gnome development. Red Hat has lots of money and eve more important expertise in house to tackle such problems. The KWin guys don't have these resources.
Open source gives the means to find, analyze and fix bugs, but its not mandatory. Saying so would mean that one has to know the code bases of every open source library used by his or her application. Thats ridiculous.
The firefox devs sure don't plan to get into linux graphics driver development and thats fine.
The real problem is that the driver teams don't have enough resources (money and developers) to get the job done. I'd be happy to vote with my feet and only buy graphics hardware with good open source drivers to encourage to hardware vendors to hire linux kernel developers. But right now I have to stick with nvidia since their drivers, though not open source and certainly have their own bugs, are the only sufficient choice for OpenGL (and OpenCL) on linux.
If you need to hardware accelerate web browsers these days, I think that more indicates a problem with modern website design.
Curious... I just tried lithosphere with my Kubuntu 10.04 i7-860 HD5970 setup (proprietary ATI drivers). There are no errors, but the output plane just stays a flat plane no matter how I fiddle with the sliders using the provided examples. Could this be a driver issue?
If you are interested about 3D performance on ANY platform, your choices aren't terribly diverse.
It's down to only 2 vendors: ATI & Nvidia.
It doesn't really matter if drivers for crappy gear is "whitelisted" in MacOS or Windows.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I wonder if this has to do with the removal of binary firmware blobs from the kernel of some distros. I disabled DRI a few months back after seeing a lot of instability in newer kernels.
Honestly, hardware acceleration is something I've never really counted on in Linux anyways. I tend to use some pretty random hardware, and I know that kernel drivers and Xorg are typically in a constant state of flux. So I usually don't enable it unless I'm playing around with some games in Wine. Linux is fast enough for other things that not having it doesn't make any difference.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Thank God I got Nvidia drivers installed on Gentoo =D
I learned a LONG time ago that NVidia is the only serious solution for 3D acceleration on Linux. No, those other drivers just being able to run compiz don't count. It is why My new PC has an NVidia card, my last few have had NVidia cards, and my future ones will too.
I once maid the mistake of buying a laptop with graphics from a different vendor. The machine performed like a Pentium 2 in almost every 3D game, and you can be sure that it will never happen again.
I'm not a paid shill or anything, I just expect the hardware I pay for to work.
So, thank you NVidia for providing a solution that actually does what I need.
nVidia supplies top-flight OpenGL drivers with their cards. They are in every way as stable and as fast as their DirectX drivers, and support the latest standards. ATi's OpenGL drivers are nearly as good. I haven't tested them recently but last time I did they weren't quite as fast as DirectX, but nearly so, and their feature support is current (4.1 with the current drivers). Their main issue is with older games since they can't limit extensions reporting which can cause problems for games that can't handle all the extensions modern cards have.
The support is true over many generations too. The very latest cards, the 580 and 6970, support OpenGL (version 4.1 in this case), and support had been there for a long time. Go back and get an original GeForce 256, you find that it supports OpenGL (1.4 in its case) and every card in between. Not an extra download either, it is part of the standard drivers they provide on their website (and their OEMs ship with their cards).
That isn't non-existent, that is heavily supported. More or less if you have a dedicated graphics accelerator on Windows, you have OpenGL support. The only major graphics provider I don't know about in Intel. I know their graphics chips have OpenGL support, though it lags a bit, but I've no idea how good it is.
Regardless, I'd say Windows drivers being "practically non existent" is very incorrect. If you want 3D acceleration for your system, you purchase an nVidia or ATi card. They are the only guys in the business anymore. They both supply current OpenGL drivers with their current products. Means OpenGL drivers are readily available, and in fact installed on most systems that have discreet 3D.
Rather nVidia's drivers are a result of two things:
1) Getting tired of the Linux situation. Much of the problems with the bullshit in X and the underlying layers nVidia just avoids by bypassing it all with their drivers. They do things their own way and it works. They weren't interesting in fucking around with all the politics and BS and waiting around for a reasonable standard to get developed, and just made something that works. They shouldn't have to, and didn't on Windows which provides a solid graphics infrastructure (which also allows for extension so you can implement other APIs like OpenGL) but htey did on Linux.
2) Their drivers use code they've licensed that they can't distribute. Various things are patented or licensed in some way and they can't just hand it out. So to do an OSS version would mean to rewrite the drives without it, and generally using programmers that had never worked with it to avoid issues of contamination. That is difficult and expensive. Before you claims that can't be the case note that AMD hasn't just opened up their binary drivers. The reason is the same.
Basically nVidia did what was best for their business, and best for their customers that want to get work done. They made Linux graphics drivers that work well. They aren't OSS friendly, but they can accelerate OpenGL well and they have been doing so for years. They weren't interested in ideological purity or the like, they were interested in having good support, and their strategy delivered and is STILL the only one that does, after all this time.
Maybe in a few years you'll be right, there'll be an open solution that works as good or better. Maybe at that point nVidia will use it. However right now I have trouble faulting them. Their shit works where the other's don't. That is really all that matters.
Why would a server OS require hardware browser acceleration?
Can't speak on Linux as I haven't used it on the desktop but for Windows, their drivers are fine. I still wouldn't rank them as highly as nVidia's, but it is mostly advanced features. Stability wise they are great, and they support all the current technologies (DX11, DirectCompute, OpenGL 4.1, etc).
I've had a 5870 for about a year now and it has worked real well, I don't find myself saying "Man I wish I'd stuck with nVidia." Now I still like nVidia better, and I'll be getting an nVidia card next round if they have a competitive offering (they didn't when I bought the 5870, they currently do) but it is for little things. For example nVidia handles per application settings much more gracefully than ATi. I have no reservations at all about using and recommending ATi, if they are the better value.
That was certainly not always true. There was a time when I wouldn't touch ATi with a 10-foot pole. However these days, for Windows at least, they are fine to use. Graphics are fast and the system doesn't crash, which is really what matters.
The Evergreen 5xxx cards were well ahead of Nvidia in performance and power consumption. Over the longer term, AMDs openness about hardware specs. will play out to their advantage. A policy direction like this one takes years to play out. They decided to invest development effort into cleaning up their code base so they could open source the majority of the specifications. This is a slow process and likely diverted talent from bug fixing their proprietary drivers. Meanwhile Linux is trending to a saner architecture for support of modern video cards. I can see Linux driver support (for AMD at least) becoming a strength two or three years from now.
From another perspective AMD simultaneously bet the farm and bit off more than they could chew with their fusion ambitions. Maybe they could chew it, but the kind of slow chewing you do when your cheeks are too full. The Global Foundries transition also added to the chipmunk cheeks.
It would have been a killer initiative had it been released on the original time frame, and still looks pretty good if their releases this year are quality out of the gate. They aren't in a good position to stumble again.
Slowly the driver support and the product releases are coming closer together. Hate to see them becoming the Postgres of the graphics industry. So much better it's not even funny, but at the bottom of most people's lists for reasons forgotten to time.
"The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." Isn't that written somewhere in the Linux license agreement?
Hell, it's not like the proprietary video driver developers are making a killing selling their software.
RMS's view is that you should get paid for your labor but not get paid for taking away someone elses freedom. Sometimes the model works effortlessly, sometimes it runs into complications.
Indeed. Using FreeBSD/amd64 here, and as soon as I've started programming OpenGL past Mesa3D (OpenGL 3.3 and 4.0/4.1), only the NVIDIA proprietary blob worked more or less fine (though it has its set of quirks and bugs). No luck with ATI/AMD nor with INTEL drivers and GPUs.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
If I was writing cross-platform (actually I am doing this right now), I would be working from an abstract interface in any case
So how would you write a program to make it portable across two or more of the following?
the Mac ships with NVIDIA card, doesn't it (I don't own one)
I seem to remember that Intel Macs prior to mid-2009 shipped with Intel's GMA ("Graphics My Arse") integrated GPU instead of an NVIDIA GPU.
What is "got nooked"? The only "nook" I can think of are Tom Nook from Animal Crossing series and Barnes & Noble's reader device. There wasn't anything in the article about "nook".
If the Linux and Open Source community took that attitude, they never would have become a force to be reckoned with on the server market. OSX proves that Unix-like operating systems are ripe for the desktop. I really do blame the hardware manufacturers for not taking Linux/BSD more seriously. Sometimes both of the proprietary and open source drivers for Linux/BSD are junk. I would be less likely to blame the hardware manufacturers if they released, in entirety, their hardware specifications to the community. Just to make a point that it can be done, OpenBSD supports full 3D Hardware and OpenGL acceleration when using Intel chipsets and it works extremely well.
Ati going open source with it's drivers was the most PR for the $ they could get in the situation, in some sense it was the death of proper support for Linux since there won't be enough people and interest to maintain a sane/competent driver for all the versions of the cards if Ati doesn't do it themselves. Nvidia's OpenGL support over the years has been stellar compared to Ati's so there isn't any point in arguing over open source vs binary blops; the main point from here on is that crippled drivers won't cut it.
Graphics drivers are all over the place. For instance, the intel stack, to be complete, requires:
- the xserver tree
- the protocols tree
- the libdrm tree
- the intel 2d video driver (includes separated DDX driver and XvMC driver)
- the kernel (drm tree)
- mesa with its integrated drivers
- libva (for vaapi)
That's 5 hardware-accessing drivers (internal kernel, DDX, XvMC, internal Mesa, libva) in 4 trees linked together with libraries and applications coming from 3 more trees. And they call each other through layers and layers of function arrays with no real documentation at any level. It's always fun when trying to understand a function to see it calling another one through a function pointer which after two more indirections finally ends up in another function a paragraph after the original one. And you have to trace everything, because the just as innocuous call after that one is in fact going to send a message through a drm connection and the X server to the DDX driver. And will be as documented as the previous one. Add to that a (failed, but present) tentative in the code to support almost any combination of versions in this dreadful house of cards, and you end up with an astounding amount of added complexity that does not make debugging easy.
And fixing that is probably not going to ever happen until X/Mesa is dead under its own weight. The bitching when the n protocol trees became the one protocols tree was incredible, I don't see the poor soul who managed that one doing it ever again.
OG.
This has always been the number one reason to NOT use Linux on the desktop. Graphics Drivers. I've been an avid user since almost the beginning. I remember back to about '94 or '95 and I have said all along, "What is the problem?" "Why is it so difficult to get (back then) simple hardware acceleration?" Now, of course, change that to Why is iot so hard to get 3D acceleration? Why? Perhaps the big 2 have some vested reason because they are absolutely contributing to holding back the widespread adoption of Linux on the desktop. Monetary gains? If you think it is beyond normal reasoning to think Microsoft is above payoffs- well then your just naive. Someone is driving this. For over 10 years Linux has been left behind, purposely. I understand it's not in a company's best interest to develop for a niche market but this is beyond that line of thinking so save the "educated" responses for someone who gives a rats ass what fanbois with biased views have to say. I don't. I'm just saying take a serious look at the history out there. something is really not right. the drivers they do release are years behind the windows counterparts with minimal support.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Hardware acceleration in FF4 just breaks cleartype and makes all of the text blurry, anyway. I don't understand how anyone can stand to leave it enabled.
If OpenGL and hardware acceleration only work with the binary nVidia drivers AND those features are what you need. THEN BUY nVidia HARDWARE AND USE THEIR DRIVERS.
Otherwise, put your money where your mouth is and pay for better OS drivers, or STFU.
They weren't interested in good support. They weren't interested in doaing any support at alll. Which is why every distro has a 100 threads 50000 posts long about how to hack the shitty blob into place. Then don't ever dare to update any thing on your system or your blob breaks your system. Rebuilding and reinstalling may or may not work depending on whether NVidia felt like staying up to date with the OS or not. When you have to teach people how to compile their own drivers and then hack them in trashing the rest of the system it makes it a tough sell to pass it off as great support.
All sorts of hobbiests in EVERY single aspect of human endeavor and interest,A to Z, you name it, manage to push forward the accumulated knowledge and tech advances in their chosen fields, where it is shared around..while still maintaining another day job to pay the bills. And programming has an absurdly low point of entry for hobbiests compared to a lot of other pursuits. You can be a programmer with a hundred dollar used computer and a cheap internet connection. No special clothing, tools, room, space, travel..nothing else required.
Just compare to anything..oh shoot, bicycling and working on bikes, or dirt bikes, or any of the extreme sports, or entry level sailboating or building car hotrods at home....all those fields and thousands more have had significant advances thunked up and pushed forward by people who had other than that hobby/interest/sport day jobs to pay the bills, and the cash needed to pursue those hobbies is WAY higher once you get into tweaking and customizing, which is what writing a custom program/driver is.
I know I came up with some pretty well advanced concepts in bicycling that are now in world wide use, never made a penny on it, did not get paid to do it, managed to pay my normal day to day bills otherwise. At least as important as some 3d driver, comparing fields to fields and how it made things better. I don't program myself, but am just not seeing your argument having much in the way of validity.
I think open source is fine for generic tools that a lot of people want and can contribute to. Something like a browser or word processor.
I think open source is not the way to go for software that requires a lot of specialized knowledge, because by its very nature you then become dependent on a very small transient group of developers.
Next to that I think it's time that the Linux kernel developers got off their high horse and give the kernel a good binary driver API. I also think that it would help if they'd raise the hardware abstraction level to the level of what I'd call "virtual devices" So for example make it have a concept of a "phone" with contact lists, and a calendar for example. I think a lot of stuff that Gnome and KDE are now trying to do, should be at the kernel level. This would give programmers a uniform API to use and would make it much easier to write Linux programs and just leave the GUI to the widget toolkits.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
Blender's interface is completely OpenGL - and it runs fine on Linux. If they can make it work, I'm sure the folks at Mozilla - albeit new to OpenGL programming obviously - can figure it out too. Definitely need to keep an open-standards browser based off open software rather than tying in to DirectX.
...we just ask the vendors how much it would cost to let them hire devs to implement decent OpenGL support? Then we could, perhaps, start a fundraiser? I'm sure there are enough people out there willing to pitch in a few dollars.
Could someone please clarify how much improvement in rendering time/quality would a proper hardware-based 3D acceleration bring to the experience of web browsing? I mean, what would the differences be on e.g news sites or /.org with hardware vs software rendering?
I'm a bit puzzled, because if 3D support on browsers is an important issue, how are Android tablets, which are going to take the market by storm this year, supposed to even work as mainly browsing devices? Especially when they don't feature Nvidia graphics hardware? Or is there no hardware-based graphics acceleration at all on these devices?
couple the lack of acceleration with that damn html 5 video tag and we are really going to have non viable desktop browsers. At least at the moment we can disable most of the cpu killing content with flashblock.
...if you *don't* consider video drivers. As a developer on this platform, I found the OpenGL portion of video drivers on OsX 10.6 (both Radeon and Nvidia) embarassing. It is perfectly possible to crash the entire Os, tearing down the OS to the infamous black screen of death, by simply conding trivial bugs into the OpenGL code. Debugging is almost a nightmare in this way. I congratulate with Firefox team, they sure had perfect code at the outset. I wonder how worse can the Linux drivers be, w.r.t. to the OsX ones.
My browser is faster than yours.
http://img834.imageshack.us/img834/931/haharr.jpg
I think there is a a lot of negativity going on here, but I don't think there needs to be. Gallium3D/KMS/DRM is moving along nicely, as are the drivers that use it. It's all new, but it is moving well, and at the end, the drivers will be easier to maintain with much more code sharing between them. This process also removes the drivers from X. This will make X development easier too, hopefully reinvigorating X development. It also makes X alterantives realistic possible, which is why all the excitement about Wayland. It's all a lot of big changes, and it's not finished. It's not surprising it's not perfect yet. Personally I can't wait for Nouveau to be able to take over from NVidia's closed drivers. People here are raving about them, but they crash about once a month for me, which is worse then any other driver on the system (non of which crash). You also get left behind with all the X development as NVidia don't take part. As the drivers start getting feature complete, optimization will be increasingly the new goal (stablity will always be a goal). This is happening! Nouveau has replaced nv, the open ATI and getting better all the time, and I expect Nouveau 3D to start becoming enabled as standard quite soon.
The open source ATI stuff is mostly junk.
Well, and that is ATI's fault. ATI fails to supply a working open source driver.
nVidia also fails to supply a working open source driver, but at least they provide a working binary driver.
Incidentally, ATI's Windows driver on my Windows 7 machine crashes with regularity as well, so maybe the problem is just bad ATI hardware.
It's a bit unfair to say OpenGL is bad just because the open source guys can't implement it correctly in the Linux drivers.
It isn't the responsibility of "the open source guys" to reverse engineer hardware to create drivers for it. They do that because manufacturers are pig-headed, but if there is no good, working ATI driver for Linux, that's ATI's fault and ATI's fault alone.
There are effectively two manufacturers of accelerated 3D graphics cards these days: nVidia and ATI. So, Linux works well with at least half the major 3D graphics card manufacturers.
I also wonder how accurate the claims of the FF developers are. Frankly, their Linux effort has never been all that good to begin with. And I haven't had any problems with Compiz or games on ATI and Linux (at least not any more than on ATI+Windows, which is also buggy).
And fixing that is probably not going to ever happen until X/Mesa is dead under its own weight.
X is a protocol, and a pretty good one at that. There is no reason for it to "die", since nobody has come up with anything better yet. Both the Windows and the OS X graphics architectures are inferior.
The X server software and Mesa should get updated. But it actually works pretty well. Most of the things you list are fairly specific add-ons, and having those access the hardware separately seems like a good thing; why would I want to have all that extra crap in a single project?
People need to do some refactoring, cleanup, and documentation. But, hey, what else is new. But there is nothing really wrong with having those different pieces of functionality factored into seperate projects.
Use tools to fit the job: 1. on the desktop work on Windows or OSX with linux on VMware or VirtualBox or SSH to a separate hardware. 2. leave linuxes for what they were meant for: server and embedded with remote CLI interface.
There will be less pain and boring /. articles in the world...
Interesting stance from linux-heads ... I'm a troll for pointing out the obvious. I mean really, does anybody genuinely believe that linux will ever be able to catch up enough with the industry and consumers on the desktop to be noticed? I think its a lost cause.
And those hours spent on programming the latest desktop graphics drivers could be spent on something useful - for example more work for Asterisk (PBX) and Racoon (KAME) for example. Beta testing and debugging these has been well worth the effort at least in my projects - there is nothing comparable that could do secure IP telephony other than a linux-server - but if I need to work on graphics or browse the web I have a macbook for that...
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
The use of "hardware acceleration" in browsers is silly; browsers do standard 2D graphics through standard 2D graphics APIs. If that isn't already hardware accelerated as much as it can be by the regular graphics APIs, then the regular graphics APIs need to get fixed.
Of course, the 2D graphics APIs on Windows and OS X are slow, which is why people are doing this. But then they need to get fixed. I'm not convinced that on X11, this is going to make a difference.
For 3D graphics, you need OpenGL, of course. But for that, FF should also just use it when need it and leave it up to the user to decide whether it's fast enough and stable enough.
The complication is that the freedom to pass out the product to all and sundry is mutually exclusive with getting paid for your labour. No matter what he claims, he most certainly is against people making money from software.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
The problem is that if you run an Nvidia binary, it usually constrains you to running certain kernel versions. If that kernel version has a security problem, and you need to upgrade it to overcome the security problem, your Nvidia binary may now not work. So what do you do? Do you continue to have video and run a kernel with a known security vulnerability, or do you run a fixed kernel and have no video. You'll be stuck in that position for as long as it takes for Nvidia to upgrade their driver. That might occur quickly if your card is 12 months old, but what if it is 3 years old. IOW, you security depends on how important the security issue is to Nvidia, and they may not consider it as important as you do, or be willing to fix it as quickly as it is necessary for you to. This problem doesn't exist with open source video card drivers.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
The state of linux audio is troubled as you say, but it's not entirely (or even mostly) the fault of Linux. Software daemons were required in the past to properly mix the audio before sending it to the card (via the OSS /dev/dsp); Linux has replaced this requirement thanks to the use of ALSA and plugins like dmix. The problem is that many binary only linux applications either don't support ALSA at all or do so incorrectly to the extent that dmix doesn't function properly.
Hardware mixing audio devices (like the popular emu10k1) get around this requirement all together and can allow multiple sources to stream audio to the same device with no need for a software mixer. These mixers even work with legacy applications that only support OSS.
I think the last time I used freebsd there were no audio drivers for my card (it's been several years), but it would be interesting if they managed to implement a solid software mixing solution while still using OSS.
The complication is that the freedom to pass out the product to all and sundry is mutually exclusive with getting paid for your labour. No matter what he claims, he most certainly is against people making money from software.
Kind of, his idea is that, to be paid, those who build the software must be the ones that use the software to make money. The problem with that is not all software can be used to make money without actually selling it - games for instance - and not all companies that use software to make money can afford to have a development team working to improve/maintain that software. The reality is that neither proprietary nor open source is the be-all and end-all solution and they can coexist quite nicely.
OpenGL on Linux is rock solid.
We can safely conclude these are all rendering problems in Firefox itself - it has a few known bugs, eg. in the layout engine. You STILL cannot print across frames or iframes from Firefox and they refuse to fix it (its obviously impossible since they haven't done it by now, indicating m$ level of spaghettiness internally).
But lets face it, FF is reaching the end of its lifespan anyway, its annoyances are starting to outpace its flexibility and MY GOD ITS SLOW. Even on hardcore graphics acceleration on a fast multicore machine its a crawler.
Gimp supposedly has 2.5 people working on it. How many people do you think work on Photoshop? Face the facts, Stallman didn't get the economic side figured out. He just declared open source to be a right and in response to difficult economic questions he merely reiterates the rights he has declared.
Apparently there is a fork of Firefox called http://www.palemoon.org/ . They think the Windows build is not optimized thus slower than Linux versions, and they basically do a specific build of the code to make it faster. Oh no what will happen when this is combined with Windows Hardware acceleration!
The model doesn't work for most software since most software doesn't require support and is not sold in a package with hardware.
Most software has to be sold directly, it's a fraction of software that can be sold along with the source. For most software the value is in the code, not in services or hardware sold with it.
He just drapes his open source goals in "freedom" rhetoric to make it sound more important.
It's time to question the unstable abi and corresponding GPL religion. Linux is stuck in a rut.
The answer to your question is that it depends.
There main thing that Gecko uses 3D acceleration for right now, apart from WebGL itself, is compositing. That means that any time you have parts of a page that can move relative to each other you can optimize this by keeping those parts in separate textures on the graphics card and just doing a hardware composite with some offset as needed. The alternative to this is to do the compositing operation in software, which is quite a bit slower.
So the main use of 3d acceleration is for cases when stuff is moving relative to other stuff on a webpage. Typical examples would be:
1) scrolling on a page with a background-attachment:fixed background
2) scrolling on a page with fixed-position elements
3) A page that uses CSS transforms and changes the transform values
4) A page that animates some objects using CSS positioning
5) A page that uses CSS transitions in combination with either of the previous two items
None of this happens much on slashdot or a news site. It happens all the time in games, say. Items 2 above happens on things like W3C specs and various sites out on the web, and scrolling of such sites is often much choppier if you disable hardware acceleration. Depending on the complexity of the graphics, it can be choppy enough to be a serious usability problem.
As far as mobile goes... The scrolling issue is a fun one; Fennec has a totally different mechanism for scrolling from desktop, precisely because the desktop one wasn't really good enough for that environment. The drawback is that it will sometimes show you "The Matrix" as you scroll (shows some sort of placeholder pattern until it gets around to actually painting the bits you want to see).
I have no idea how mobile browsers will ever handle things like the ietestdrive demos or serious use of CSS transforms without hardware-accelerated graphics. Chances are, mobile platforms will end up growing those.... And then we get to see how battery life looks. Fun times all around.
sorry theirs plenty of opengl apps on linux that work fine and are rock solid. pretty much any native game hell even wine what you think it renders in. compiz etc. even if it was true they only white list only nivida and not ati drivers what does that tell you. simple they wrote it for nivida drivers then tried to run it on non nividas and got bad results. at least come out and say that and not spread total bs and lies bought linux and opengl. i will admit some cards can be buggy and crash due to drivers but most cards run just fine heck i think only via cards are the only ones left with poor support intel ati nivida all make linux drivers.
http://www.chacha.com/question/what-does-it-mean-to-get-nooked
"Nooked is a slang term which means the act of getting owned so hard you black out."
You Penguins? You definitely got NOOKED! LMAO
On my Asus U35jc under Ubuntu you have to turn off NVIDIA driver and use default if you want to avoid battery drain and crashes.The same for most of laptops with "hybrid graphics" under Linux
The browser is the computer...
...all this news of major instability. I run KDE 4.5.5 with a Radeon HD 4570 on my laptop and it's very stable. It's also performs well enough. And that's with compositing enabled...
The situation with the NVIDIA's Linux driver is as follows. The driver consists of three parts - RM, OpenGL, X Server. The Resource Manager obviously has a strictly Linux part and the X Server part is Linux only, but *the OpenGL part is shared between Linux and Windows*. Even in the source control system - when Windows developers commit to the OpenGL part, those changes are directly included in the Linux driver; the source itself is shared.
Tell Radiohead. They gave away their work for one album and people paid for it.
You can get free sex from women if you're at least presentable (cleanliness more than looks), yet people still get money from the sex trade.
Emacs is free, but you can buy it too. Same with Linux.
People will pay what they feel appropriate and the Free as in Speech leads to a peer-to-peer relationship where the customer and seller can agree a price as opposed to the dictat market that copyright gives where it's their way or the high way if you're a consumer.
Consider, for example, the "Free Market". See the first word there?
..started a war against proprietary hardware drivers banning them from many distros and hammering those crappy open source nouveau and ati drivers, on everybody. Now go ahead and enjoy your beautifully crippled firefox. I'm not saying that we don't need open source drivers, we DO NEED them. But before raising bans, let's at least be sure that they WORK WELL, and let's make the installation of proprietary drivers easy and smooth.
Just my 2 cents.
...How does Wine manage to run DirectX (translated to OpenGL) and OpenGL-native apps then? A billion and one workarounds? I can imagine there being SOME workarounds, but not THAT many. I also imagine there is cooperation on the (proprietary) driver devs. Oh, and let's not forget Chrome, which has working hardware acceleration in Linux too.
Support OpenGL anyway. If a driver is faulty, the driver developers will be flooded with the most pressing bugs and then the bugs will be resolved (where possible).
I am not devoid of humor.
Not surprizing, as I have seen enough problems on my systems with X-drivers to confirm that something is wrong. This is not even with accelerated use. Error messages about error setting MTRR register using inappropriate ioctl, a Matrox driver that corrupts the screens of other consoles after ctrl-alt-F2 switching to another consoles. This is not the difficult hardware interface without specs problem, but just bugs. One problem is not enough eyes looking this code over. The work is being done by too few people, and they cannot see their own errors (common problem with all code). What will fix these bugs is more people going into the source and finding a bug cause, and maybe even submitting a fix. I've got a matrox driver to look at, and I am afraid that the error may not even be there, as I cannot find the text of the error messages (they mis-spelled a word which should make it easy to grep for, but so far no luck, not even in the /usr/bin).