How To Enable Hardware Acceleration In Firefox 4

One of the new features of Firefox 4, and other next-gen browsers, is hardware acceleration. Hardware acceleration is the ability to use your PC’s graphic chip to speed up graphic intensive web applications. This is something which should be enabled by default upon installing it, but no!

When I checked the Options, something which I always do when I install something new on my PC, I saw that the box “Use hardware acceleration when available” wasn’t checked, so I checked this and hoped that this do the trick. In order to test this I went to webGL Samples and went for the Aquarium see if it worked but I was wrong again as I didn’t saw any fishes.

So to make sure that webGL always works in Firefox 4 you need to follow the next steps:

• Type about:config in the address bar and hit Enter
• Now, promise to Firefox that you’ll be careful and hit Enter again
• Search for webgl.force-enabled and change the value from false to true by double clicking on it.

Firefox 4 with WebGL enabled

Now with this you’ve enabled hardware acceleration in Firefox 4 and once you visit the webGL Samples you’ll see the fishes in the aquarium as you can see here above.

About Behrad:

I'm 29 years "old", married to Jannie and about to be a daddy! We live happily in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
In 2006 I started BioTecK.net just to show/share my portfolio. After a while I started to blog about my experiences and stuff I do in my life, my interests; computers & computer related stuff, tips & tricks and basically everything which I want to share.
Read more about me, follow me on Twitter @BioTecK or contact me .