Users Advised to Update Graphics Drivers for Firefox 4

According to Mozilla, users will need to make sure that their graphics cards’ drivers are up to date if they wish to utilize hardware acceleration present in Firefox 4.

Benoit Jacob of Mozilla’s platform engineering team explained…

When we turned these features on by default in nightly builds around September last year, and then in Firefox 4 Beta 7, crash statistics and bug reports quickly showed that bugs in graphics drivers were often making these features misbehave,” Jacob said in a blog post. “We reacted by selectively disabling these new features on buggy drivers, based on the large amounts of information collected by beta testers.

Hardware acceleration is automatically disabled in Firefox 4 if a driver is on a blocklist created by Mozilla to prevent crashes from occurring. In addition to that, hardware acceleration was first introduced to Firefox 4 last year. Instead of doing browser page rendering and composition chores via the computer’s CPU, these tasks are now done by the GPU.

Details on what drivers are supported can be found here.