Firefox: Improve performance through hardware acceleration

April 23, 2013 · 1 min read

When you enter the holy-war of Firefox vs Chrome, basically the Chromatics throw the ultimate weapon “speed” which you feel like sort of defenseless against! This common phenomena is soon coming to an end due to various performance improvements in Firefox – including what I am going to talk about, “Hardware Acceleration”.

What is Hardware Acceleration

According to Wikipedia,

Hardware acceleration is the use of computer hardware to perform some function faster than is possible in software running on the general-purpose CPU

So basically, the point here is, hardware acceleration allows you to stuff much faster than a normal “software running on CPU” environment. Let’s have a look at how we can implement this in Firefox.

Activating Hardware Acceleration

Go to your Options / Preferences dialog. Windows -> Tools > Options Mac OS X – > Firefox > Preferences Linux > Edit > Preferences
Now, click on the “Use hardware acceleration when available” checkbox.
Close Firefox and start it up again!

TADA: You have a faster Firefox! Thanks to [Robin Mehdee](Robin Mehdee) for discovering this helpful thing.