Firefox starting slow? Try disabling hardware acceleration.

[humble3d]

Firefox starting slow? Try disabling hardware acceleration. "instructions"

The Firefox web browser is loading all web pages pretty fast on my system, not slower than Google Chrome for example, and also starting up just fine and in a matter of a second or so. While I have nothing to complain about, other users may not be that lucky. Some are reporting that Firefox takes a long time to load even though that should not really happen, especially since page loads just fine and fast in other web browsers.

Vishal discovered a fix for the issue, at least for some users of Firefox, by accident. He noticed that his version of Firefox took nine or ten seconds to load on startup, even with extensions, themes and plugins disabled. He does not mention if Firefox was trying to load a session though which may attribute to the loading time.

_http://www.askvg.com/tip-reduce-mozilla-firefox-loading-time-by-disabling-hardware-acceleration-feature/

Anyway, he tried many different fixes and tweaks to find out why Firefox was starting up so slow and nothing seemed to work, until he disabled hardware acceleration in the browser's options.

A restart afterwards showed that this resolved the issue that he was facing. Now, I'm not entirely sure how the hardware acceleration feature is linked to the browser's startup, but since disabling the feature did speed up the loading of the browser, it must be in some way.
Disable hardware acceleration

To disable hardware acceleration in the Firefox web browser do the following:
Tap on the Alt-key on the keyboard and select Tools > Options from the menu that opens up.
Switch to Advanced > General in the new options menu.
Locate "Use hardware acceleration when available" and uncheck the option.
Restart Firefox.

If the feature is responsible for your browser's slow loading time, you should notice a speed boost on the next start of Firefox.
Check if your browser is using hardware acceleration

If the parameter is enabled, it does not mean that your Firefox version is indeed making use of hardware acceleration. To check up on that, enter about:support into the address bar of the browser and load it.

Navigate down to the graphics section here and locate the GPU Accelerated Windows parameter. If it reads 0/x then it is not being used. This may be a driver issue or because the graphics card is not supported. If you see a number other than zero before /x then it is enabled and used in Firefox.


There are some alternatives that you may want to explore. The first thing that you may want to do is make sure that you have the latest driver installed on your system. Visit the Nvidia or AMD graphics driver website and check the latest version available for your graphics adapter. If it is out of date, download it and install it.

I would then enable hardware acceleration again in Firefox to see if the updated driver resolved the issue that you have been facing.
Closing Words

It is always a good idea to update the video card driver first if you suspect issues with your browser's hardware acceleration. If that does not resolve the issues you are facing, disable hardware acceleration in the browser. It should not really make that much of a difference when you are browsing regular websites on the Internet anyway.

_http://www.ghacks.net/2013/07/12/firefox-starting-slow-try-disabling-hardware-acceleration/?

Edited July 27, 2013 by 7h3Pr3d47oR
Edit title

[mazigh]

Hardware Acceleration is Good but it's risky on medium hardware, it may break your GPU (overheat)

[ffi]

Hardware Acceleration is Good but it's risky on medium hardware, it may break your GPU (overheat)

it won't certainly not if you don't overclock but even if you do the gpu will protect itself and throttle down

[Paft]

Also: http://www.crystalidea.com/speedyfox

[lurch234]

It is always a good idea to update the video card driver first if you suspect issues with your browser's hardware acceleration.

[demoneye]

if it come to disable hardware acceleration .... you better disable firefox instead ! :wtf:

[ASIO]

this is not applicable for all gpu :wtf: :wtf: :wtf: :wtf: :wtf: :wtf: :wtf: :wtf: :wtf: :wtf:

[Tarik]

I guess this is all about your > Processor RAM and Windows

[bob92132]

You can also disable hardware acceleration on Chrome and experience a speedup. With multicore CPUs these days, CPU availability isn't really a problem and operations can often be done faster on the CPU than on the GPU when doing light operations that aren't going to overload either. The main difference is that you can prevent Chrome from having to load the entire overhead of the GPU interface subsystem.

Memory usage also becomes lower with GPU disabled since doesn't have to load and run all the overhead of the GPU subsystem code into memory. In Chrome, if you go to Menu>"View Background Processes" there is no longer a memory eating "GPU Process" that is running there.

To disable GPU Process in Chrome, add these flags to your chrome.exe shortcuts on start menu and desktop (also should modify registry associations pointing to chrome.exe)

"--disable-gpu --disable-software-rasterizer"

Also, for Chrome, this flag GREATLY reduces memory usage as well

"--process-per-site"

Some links with more info

http://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/

http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/process-models

Edited July 29, 2013 by bob92132

[demoneye]

i

You can also disable hardware acceleration on Chrome and experience a speedup. With multicore CPUs these days, CPU availability isn't really a problem and operations can often be done faster on the CPU than on the GPU when doing light operations that aren't going to overload either. The main difference is that you can prevent Chrome from having to load the entire overhead of the GPU interface subsystem.

Memory usage also becomes lower with GPU disabled since doesn't have to load and run all the overhead of the GPU subsystem code into memory. In Chrome, if you go to Menu>"View Background Processes" there is no longer a memory eating "GPU Process" that is running there.

To disable GPU Process in Chrome, add these flags to your chrome.exe shortcuts on start menu and desktop (also should modify registry associations pointing to chrome.exe)

"--disable-gpu --disable-software-rasterizer"

Also, for Chrome, this flag GREATLY reduces memory usage as well

"--process-per-site"

Some links with more info

http://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/

http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/process-models

i wounder if all the above doesn't slow down google chrome...since using also gpu when having more than one core is maybe unnecessary.

Edited July 29, 2013 by demoneye

[DKT27]

Hardware acceleration is not recommended for older graphics cards anyway.

[demoneye]

Hardware acceleration is not recommended for older graphics cards anyway.

the thing is "older HA" is something in general , maybe google OR mozilla should list a working / supported Gpu list :D

anyhow i disabled my gpu , see no speed decrease what so ever (using quad cpu ). :)

Edited July 29, 2013 by demoneye

[bob92132]

Hardware acceleration is not recommended for older graphics cards anyway.

the thing is "older HA" is something in general , maybe google OR mozilla should list a working / supported Gpu list :D

anyhow i disabled my gpu , see no speed decrease what so ever (using quad cpu ). :)

Both mozilla and google already implement GPU blacklists - they disable 3D driver subsystem and use CPU rendering for the following old cards and drivers.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drivers

https://code.google.com/p/chromium-source-browsing/source/browse/software_rendering_list.json?repo=chrome--browser--resources--software-rendering-list

https://www.khronos.org/webgl/wiki/BlacklistsAndWhitelists

GPU is only useful when you need extra processing power when the CPU is already maxed out, such as in games. For browsers - the CPU can handle everything fine without becoming overloaded. The CPU can generally do things faster than the GPU for reasons such as -

#1. CPU processing because it is closer to the RAM and closer to the L1 and L2 caches

#2. CPU processing does not require the application to load a separate GPU subsystem and data does not have to go through separate video driver interface to load and get data.

#3. GPU drivers are often coded non-optimally, whereas CPU drivers are already always loaded and are in general optimized as fast as they can be.

Edited July 29, 2013 by bob92132