topic Re: Hardware acceleration in the browser? in i.MX Processors

Hardware acceleration in the browser?

NeilSimpson — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 08:01:46 GMT

Good morning everyone, I am new to the forum and hope to become a regular.

I have an i.MX53 QSB and my application needs to run a web browser. I have Ubuntu Lucid installed and so have Firefox 3 and Chromium, but I would love to be able to use hardware acceleration to help with rendering animated elements (like a scrolling text window, for example). I think this should be possible using OpenGL, but I am not sure whether to try building Firefox 4 and try to make it use OpenGL, or try Qt and build a webkit based browser. I would be very grateful for any advice from anyone on this. The other option is change OS....

Thanks in advance.

Re: Hardware acceleration in the browser?

daiane_angolini — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 17:19:01 GMT

Do you want to accelerate the browser?

Can you, please, make one simple test. Please, open Firefox from some terminal, then look if you can see any GPU log.

I can´t remember how much was hardware accelerated into Firefox code. But I suppose this kind of support is provided by kernel. If kernel receives any 3D command it will decide if the function is HW or SW.

Re: Hardware acceleration in the browser?

PrabhuSundarara — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 07:23:06 GMT

Are you trying to use WebGL for HW acceleration? Firefox 4.0 and above will support for WebGL. Not sure how much Firefox WebGL supported on Ubuntu ARM.

Re: Hardware acceleration in the browser?

NeilSimpson — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 08:16:38 GMT

Thanks to you both for the replies.

If I run Firefox (3.6.18) from the terminal and try a webgl demo page the page shows an error saying I don't have webgl in my browser. I do not see any log in the working directory.

I am not really sure if I need webgl because it looks like it is for 3D effects - I don't want 3D, I just want to use GPU acceleration to help render animated 2D effects like transitions and text animation (scrolling).

Is there a pre-built Firefox 4 for this platform, or do I have to build it from source? Has anyone done this and made it work?