Mozilla urges users to update graphics drivers for Firefox 4

Mozilla has urged users to update their graphics cards' drivers if they want to take advantage of Firefox 4's hardware acceleration.

Last Friday, Benoit Jacob, who works on Mozilla's platform engineering team, spelled out why users should verify that their computers, especially PCs powered by Windows, have the latest graphics drivers.

"When we turned these features on by default in nightly builds around September last year, and then in [Firefox 4] Beta 7, crash statistics and bug reports quickly showed that bugs in graphics drivers were often making these features misbehave," Jacob said in a blog post. "We reacted by selectively disabling these new features on buggy drivers, based on the large amounts of information collected by beta testers."

To prevent crashes, Mozilla created a list of graphics drivers that Firefox 4 reads; if a driver is on the "blocklist," the browser disables hardware acceleration.

:story: Full story: Computerworld