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Why Linux Loses Out On Hardware Acceleration In Firefox

Posted by timothy on from the ugly-bridesmaid dept.

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)."

3 of 456 comments (clear)

  1. Say what????? by jvillain · · Score: 1, Flamebait
    Who modded this up to 5?

    They weren't interested in ideological purity or the like, they were interested in having good support,

    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.

  2. Re:It's true. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Any ./'er who has ever browsed a linux forum knows that the Linux community also has a bit of a chip on it's shoulder as well as far as the blame game. It's all to common that you see someone posing a problem being dismissed out of hand.

  3. Re:No, not correct by short · · Score: 1, Flamebait
    Basically nVidia did what was best for their business, and best for their customers that want to get work done.

    read as: Good enough for those not doing any own software development and/or bugreporting.

    With closed source parts of your system you can never be sure where the rare crash came from. You cannot recompile the driver with safety barriers (_FORTIFY_SOURCE, mudflap, valgrind...), hardware watchpoints trap in binary code you cannot easily verify...

    This results in unstable software commonly found on closed source platforms as nobody can provide reliable software there.