Firefox and some plugins use your graphics card to help speed up the display of web content. Graphic cards are also used by advanced web features like WebGL. To fix problems with these features or to take advantage of them, you may need to update your graphics card drivers. This article describes how to do that.
Search for and install new graphics drivers Using Windows UpdateSome recent graphics driver versions are made available as an optional update from the Windows Update feature. If you haven't set Windows to automatically install recommended updates, follow these steps:
Windows Vista: The View available updates panel will open. Click "Optional".
Windows 7: The Select updates you want to install panel will open.
In Windows 10, all drivers are automatically downloaded and installed through Windows Update but you can manually search for an updated graphics driver. See Microsoft's support article, Update drivers in Windows 10 for details. If there are no updates available or if the updates don't solve your problems, continue to the next section.
Some computer manufacturers include a system update tool that updates drivers and bypasses the Windows ones. You may be required to use this tool to update graphics drivers.
Just search for this tool from the menu. Some possible search terms are the name of your computer manufacturer (such as Dell or HP) or generic terms like "update", "maintenance" or "driver". Open the tool and apply all available updates.
If there is no update tool, no updates available, or if the updates don't solve your problems, continue to the next section.
Use your distribution's standard update processIf your distribution's standard update process doesn't give you the latest drivers, you may need to look for other package repositories for your distribution. For example, to upgrade closed-source drivers on Ubuntu, you may need to go to System Settings > Hardware > Additional Drivers.
Using the latest generic graphics driversYou can also install a generic graphics driver from your graphics card manufacturer's website. These are usually kept up-to-date and are designed to work on a variety of systems:
If you don't know which graphics card you have, look in the graphics section of Firefox's about:support Troubleshooting Information page.
Note: Hardware acceleration is not available for graphics cards from other manufacturers.
Note: After downloading the graphics driver, the installation wizard may prevent you from installing it because your current driver is customized by your computer manufacturer.
Warning: With some combinations of computer and graphics card, you may experience problems with generic versions of software drivers.
Reboot your computer to use the new graphics driver.
I still have problems with my graphics card in FirefoxUnfortunately, due to the wide range of possible driver, video card and operating system combinations, hardware acceleration or 3D web graphics (WebGL) may still not work for you in Firefox. In these instances you fix the problems by disabling hardware acceleration and WebGL.
Turning off hardware accelerationThese instructions are for experienced Firefox users. Changing settings in the
Configuration Editor(
about:config) can have serious effects on your browser’s stability, security and performance.
.
These fine people helped write this article:
AliceWyman,
Chris Ilias,
Cheng Wang,
Underpass,
Tonnes,
user47661,
Jesse_Ruderman,
Michael Verdi,
scoobidiver,
bjacob,
Swarnava Sengupta,
Joergen,
Younghwan Kwon,
Ed,
Wesley Branton,
Lan,
scootergrisen,
Joni,
Heather,
Ömer Timur VolunteerGrow and share your expertise with others. Answer questions and improve our knowledge base.
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.3