Hardware acceleration hits Fennec for Android, aka Firefox for Mobile

Fennec for Android, aka Firefox for Mobile, is coming on strong and while still very much in beta, shows enormous potential. Now hardware acceleration support has hit Fennec nightlies with OpenGL-powered compositing. While this isn't the first mention of hardware acceleration for an Android browser -- Opera has promised it sometime later -- this is the first implementation for the Mozilla browser and marks good things to come.

It's off by default, but a quick blast over to about:config will reveal layers.accelerate-all, which should be set to true to enable OpenGL acceleration. After a restart of Fennec, you can check whether you've managed to successfully enable OpenGL by going to about:support and looking for 1/1 OpenGL in the 'Graphics' section.

The latest Fennec nightly builds can be downloaded from Mozilla, but hardware acceleration isn't supported on all devices at this stage. Users have reported mixed results in the comments, so proceed with caution.

Hardware acceleration hits Fennec for Android, aka Firefox for Mobile originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 16 Dec 2010 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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