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Comment by ncmncm | Hacker News Reader

Running Firefox under Qubes has become increasingly frustrating, as tabs crash whenever (apparently?) they try to use WebGL, or anything that depends on access to a GPU. More and more, Firefox seems to depend on GPU access (or something?) and fails hard when it's not there.

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To be fair, that sounds like a bug in the graphics driver or OpenGL ICD/libraries. GPUs are a bit special in that they have the power to hose your entire running OS (force a reboot due to a hard hang) no matter what OS you're running. It's just the nature of GPUs and how their drivers work... With direct access to memory and allowing user space applications access to their hardware features.

In other words: Probably not Firefox's fault. The Firefox devs probably started adding support for accelerating more stuff via the GPU via OpenGL calls and if your driver has issues with any of those calls (e.g. bad application auto-detection) it can cause things to crash or have undefined behavior.

Not much the Firefox devs can do about it but report the bug anyway. At the very least they might be able to figure a workaround.

> if your driver has issues with any of those calls (e.g. bad application auto-detection) it can cause things to crash or have undefined behavior.

If I understand it correctly, that's one of the perks of WebRender: by using the GPU more like a game engine would, we're relying on code paths that tend to be better tested / more reliable.

Isn’t it possible to disable gpu in about:config?

about:config certainly has lots of settings to turn off, but I manifestly have not found enough of them, if indeed any number is enough.

You can cross-check about:config with the about:support Graphics section.

A few switches of relevance: layers.acceleration, webgl.disabled, media.hardware-video-decoding.enabled, gfx.webrender.force-disabled

Aha! gfx.webrender.force-disabled was false. Now to ser how much difference it makes.

Yeah I had to disable gpu acceleration on Firefox in parallels. Otherwise it rendered black boxes for elements with certain styles.

That sounds like a Parallels / driver problem, not a Firefox problem.

I would love, love, love to see black boxes instead of crashes.

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