Only 30 Percent of Firefox Users Access Hardware Acceleration

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There are still some of us who unfortunately are stuck (for the next month in my case) with a cheap laptop from college with crappy Intel integrated graphics. My laptop sucks ass, Celeron T3000 dual core 1.8GHz, 4GB DDR3 10600, 320GB 5400rpm HD, and Mobile Intel 4 Series Express Chipset Family graphics and Win 7 32bit. It worked for my classes but gaming other than Angry Birds or Bejeweled is not an option. Playing a MMO game like WoW or RoM I'm lucky if I see 15-30fps on low settings. I don't own a desktop anymore but I'm going to be building a new one in the next few months with i5 3570K and Radeon 7870, 8GB DDR3 1600 Win 7 Premium 64bit. Laptop will have AMD A8-4500M +7640G (new Trinity APU) and upgraded to 8GB DDR3 1600 ram. I'll worry about HWA when I get updated systems.
 
There's still people that don't even know what Firefox is and all they know is clicking that E icon that says internet explorer, so they can "surf".
So nvidia, ati, intel, drivers.....this is too much for a lot of people.
You must have passion for computers and electronics in order to know this stuff.
People who just watch videos on youtube and check their email don't have a clue, cause they aren't minimally interested in computers, hardware, software...
 
These days, software rendering and hardware acceleration are separated by such minuscule times that nobody will ever really notice any difference.

It's not until web developers start crafting resource-intense websites and features that we'll need the hardware to kick in. And even then, you're still limited by the ISP bottleneck.

 
[citation][nom]livebriand[/nom]For the average person who doesn't do anything graphically intensive, what's the gain?[/citation]
Graphically-intensive isn't the right phrase here. I have a couple of these GMA Intel chipsets laying around. If you so much as watch a Youtube video, you could finally watch it in at least half-screen size and above 360p resolution for starters!!! Really, the door opens wide from there on.....
Laptop users are just out in the cold on this one unfortunately though.
 
[citation][nom]math1337[/nom]HW acceleration is great for really graphic intensive tasks like animations, but for most static or mostly static web pages has little benefit. As newer hardware rolls out, hardware acceleration will roll out naturally, and it never hurts to have it. I just hope that web designers don't start abusing awful animations.[/citation]
You've clearly never browsed on an AMD E-350. It's weak CPU really needs the GPU acceleration firefox and chrome give.
 
If you play Facebook games, use Netflix or watch Youtube, hardware acceleration is helpful and can definitely justify that $30 graphic card purchase.
 
[citation][nom]math1337[/nom]HW acceleration is great for really graphic intensive tasks like animations, but for most static or mostly static web pages has little benefit. As newer hardware rolls out, hardware acceleration will roll out naturally, and it never hurts to have it. I just hope that web designers don't start abusing awful animations.[/citation]

Agreed with the 'hope they don't start abusing' the animations. I personally feel that on 90% of the websites I go to, there are way too many Flash animations for advertising various products.

I gave up using an ad-blocker because it had a habit of making other functionality on webpages not work.
 
I had to turn off HW acceleration in about:config because it made the type on certain pages look horrendous. I don't know if it's a driver thing or a Firefox thing, but it looked atrocious.
 
It can cause problems in win 8 64bit, so I've had to turn it off until ATI write some new drivers, for there older cards. couldn't see a difference apart from the fact that firefox does not just crash because it feels like it.
 
You don't need to buy a separate graphics cards most likely. All intel graphics from the 4500 MHD line and after, which was released early 2008, are capable of HW acceleration. So the number should be higher than 30 percent, but most people don't update their drivers and thus the blacklist will block them.

It is really easy though, go to Windows Update prompt and Microsoft will update the driver for you, just check for it in the "optional" part of the update and that's it.

 
GPU acceleration is highly overrated! Even in professional applications. There is always a solution that runs on the CPU with a lot less hassle and has far more superior intelligent more enhanced computing and is more user/programmer friendly. Gpu is only for games. Yes I am even talking about video editing and rendering. This is the reason Intel hasn't stepped up their game since they know. I haven't seen any benefit since version 3.6 of Firefox for speed or bugs even the contrary.
 


Tell that to Adobe CS6 users with OpenCL hardware acceleration turned on.
 
I explicitly disable HWA in Firefox because I can't stand the font rendering (although it's markedly better than it was when the feature first appeared).

[citation][nom]luc vr[/nom]Gpu is only for games.[/citation]

For 3D rendering there is absolutely a benefit to doing the work on the GPU, especially if you use ray/path tracing. It's relatively easy to take parallelism to the extreme with such tasks, and the speedup can be enormous. GPU-based renderers still trail their CPU counterparts in feature count and feature maturity though (consumer CPU ray tracing dates back at least to the early 80s, so you have to expect this), so they won't necessarily meet everyone's requirements.
 
I used to have hardware acceleration enabled, but I started to run into issues while viewing clips on youtube and other online streaming sites where the screen would display an all green screen instead of the video I wanted to watch. I am not sure if this was because I had multiple windows/tabs open at the same time while I was doing this (as sometimes I will open multiple videos at once, and pause them; allowing them to buffer the content before I started to watch those selections), but I found it incredibly annoying. I did some research online and someone suggested disabling hardware acceleration. Since I did that: no green screen issues.

I am not sure if they have fixed this problem since then, but my computer (a hex core AMD system) does not have any issues playing back videos without hardware acceleration; so if it ain't broke....

And in case you were wondering, I don't have a cheap card either. I have a Galaxy GTX 570, and I tend to update my drivers fairly religiously. I don't know if this is why other people disable this feature, but for me it just makes using firefox for online videos less of a hassle.
 
Seriously, how come so few Windows 8 systems support HWA? I assume it's supported from nvidia 8xx0 and up (or maybe even lower) and for ATI Radeon HD the HD 4x00 and up should support it. Is it because the update system for drivers doesn't work? I just got an update for my GS8400 from Windows Update, development doesn't seem dead.
 
Since the data is being gathered from crash reports, and ancient systems with outdated drivers are probably more likely to crash, I think the sampling may inherently bias towards a lower number of hardware accelerated devices.
 
Since the data is being gathered from crash reports, and ancient systems with outdated drivers are probably more likely to crash, I think the sampling may inherently bias towards a lower number of hardware accelerated devices.
 
[citation][nom]heffeque[/nom]Tell that to Adobe CS6 users with OpenCL hardware acceleration turned on.[/citation]

As a Photoshop user (With OpenCL turned on) I can say it is (sadly) a mixed bag. When it works, it is wonderful, but breaks really easily between driver versions. I'm looking forward to when it matures though. With my last driver version, it caused regular crashes of Photoshop when on at all, even in "basic" mode. Two driver versions back, it worked perfectly in "Advanced" mode. With the current version, it is stable in "Standard" but not advanced mode.

GPUs are not just for games anymore, but they are going to need another 5 years before they are a reliable alternative to CPU for professional applications. Still, since most apps that will do GPU based workloads will also do the same job (MUCH slower) on the CPU, there is no reason not to use GPU in professional industrial applications... of there is a problem, just toggle off the GPU until the next driver version, or until you have time to revert to the previous one, and get back to work.
 
There is definitely an issue with FF & nvidia drivers. FF17 no problem. FF18 slowed, then while on FF18.0.2 nvidia's 314.07 issue is resolved until FF19 came out issue is back.
 
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