Comment by willheim | Hacker News Reader

Comment by willheim | Hacker News Reader

I was REALLY hopeful for FF to make a comeback with 4. I had been a convert in the 2.X days and watched as it got bloated and slower throughout 3. Switched to Chrome in version 9 and never looked back. Then IE9 came out and was so much faster than before so I had hope for FF.

Well, that hope has been quickly dashed. How? By mozilla's own demo page, the web'o'wonder. On my three year old machine it says my video drivers don't support WebGL and won't play nice with many things. What it does play nice with was not very wonderful. The "Letterheads" were choppy with a framerate probably approaching 8 or 9 fps. The 360 video refused to load. Same with Remixing Reality. IE9 wouldn't work with those and neither would Safari.

Then I tried them in Chrome. Huh. Go figure. They all worked marvelously. Yup... this new web era could be a Web o' Wonders... but it looks like it won't be featuring FF4 or IE9.

Now, can anyone tell me why FF4 has issues with WebGL but Chrome 11.0696 doesn't? And it's not just a webkit thing because Safari 5.04 isn't liking them either.

Old graphics drivers usually have severe stability issues, so Mozilla blacklists them. You need to update to more recent ones -- anything after around June 2010 should do. Check out about:support for more information. (Note that if you're on Linux Mozilla only whitelists the proprietary nvidia driver IIRC, since all the open source drivers have issues.)

I don't think chrome has blacklisted anything yet, but from what I hear Google's looking at doing it.

In general, the problem is with your computer, and not with your browser or the demos.

When one browser (in this case, Chrome) works beautifully and the other browser (in this case FF4) refuses to operate in some capacity then that is most certainly not a problem with my computer.

Do you know how many people out there have the Mobile Intel 965 Express Chipset Family for their laptops... a staggering number, I'm sure.

All you need to do is update to newer drivers. You can also force enable stuff via about:config if you wish, and at your own risk.

The blacklisting is simply risk aversion -- I'm sure you're familiar with the concept. A slow browser's better than a crashing one, and old drivers were crashing too frequently. I repeat: the problem is not with Firefox -- the problem is with your drivers. Chrome might be taking more chances with the stability of your drivers, but that's Chrome's problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com