Firefox Developers Have Issues With Linux GPU Drivers Too

[bjacob]

Man, that quote made me rage a bit. I don?t see why they could not just focus on the proprietary drivers and call it a day.

The NVIDIA proprietary driver is whitelisted.

[bjacob]

if the ff devs are focusing explicitly on open source drivers and not proprietary, then really, they're idiots.

Huh? We whitelist the proprietary NVIDIA driver precisely because it's good...

[e8hffff]

It will probably take Canonical to save Linux.

[smitty3268]

FYI, if you want to help test

It's quite possible the newest drivers have fixed issues and it's just older ones that are crashing. You can test, and report info by doing this:

For now, the best way that you
can reproduce the crashes and failures that we've been experiencing is to grab
a Firefox 4 nightly (not beta, since they have had some bugs fixed), run with the environment variable
MOZ_GLX_IGNORE_BLACKLIST defined, go to about:config and set
webgl.enabled_for_all_sites, and go to:

https://cvs.khronos.org/svn/repos/registry/trunk/public/webgl/sdk/tests/webgl-conformance-tests.html

Run the tests. If a driver can run them all with only few test failures and no
crash, it's quite probably good enough.

[deanjo]

then you would even have QT-mozilla

It's coming.

http://blog.johnford.info/linux-qt-builds-of-firefox-now-being-generated-2/

[smitty3268]

NVidia is NOT disabled on linux

From one of the developers:

NVIDIA proprietary driver is not buggy, for what we are doing (which is pure OpenGL). We are enabling hardware acceleration on X with the NVIDIA proprietary driver.

The FGLRX driver is crashier, it's blacklisted at the moment, this could change (everything hopefully will change :-) )

Yes, you can turn the whole driver blacklisting off by defining the MOZ_GLX_IGNORE_BLACKLIST environment variable. Just launch firefox with this command (you can use it in the properties of your desktop icon, too):

MOZ_GLX_IGNORE_BLACKLIST=1 firefox

We did this blacklisting to put and end to the endless series of linux crashes that were caused by buggy graphics drivers, and were causing lots of grief among linux users ("firefox 4 is crashy!"). This was the top reason for crashiness on linux.

We are looking forward to un-blacklisting drivers as soon as they get good enough

[hax0r]

bastards...

[89c51]

Someone could say that Mozilla cares about Linux because it's part of their mission.

If you don't know what a mission is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_statement

to put it better

It doesn't care enough to hire a dev or two to help on the graphic stack. Its not their mission. They care about the internet. Also linux doesn't have the marketshare to have more mozilla people working on it. If it was 50% of the desktop market then you would even have QT-mozilla or even E17-mozilla. And this is not a Mozilla problem.

[blackshard]

probably never

Mozilla doesn't care much about Linux (read marketshare) Canonical and the Spaceman is too busy trying to turn Ubuntu in a Mac clone and Intel doesn't want to move to the newer architecture (gallium3d)

+ there is no other way (financial sustainable) of funding the FOOS driver devs outside of hiring them in a company

Someone could say that Mozilla cares about Linux because it's part of their mission.

If you don't know what a mission is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_statement

[deanjo]

I wonder how much longer are companies going to keep creating stopgap solutions

As said above, probably never. Linux is full of such stopgaps where it seems "Wrapper it!!!" has become the norm instead of working on one unified, refined solution.