How to disable graphics hardware acceleration in Firefox?
Firefox doesn’t render properly on some systems (Ubuntu 22.04 + X/Wayland), but disabling GPU HW acceleration mitigates the problems. How do I turn off hardware acceleration in Firefox (without using the in-browser about:settings method)? Is there a config file that Firefox picks up?
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asked Oct 18 at 8:28
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1 Answer 1
You can create a user.js in the Firefox profile folder to force any settings you desire. This includes disabling GPU hardware acceleration.
Simply create an empty file in the Firefox profile folder, and name it user.js . Now, add the required about:config settings in the same format as in prefs.js . This way, you won’t have to use the in-browser about:settings method.
user_pref("browser.preferences.defaultPerformanceSettings.enabled", false); user_pref("layers.acceleration.disabled", true); Save the user.js file, and restart Firefox. Voilà!
Firefox high GPU usage
These graphs show the GPU usage patterns of the Flash Player plugin for Firefox and Chrome, respectively. The test involved playing a 30-second HD Facebook video. As the graphs show, Firefox uses over 40% GPU during playback. After playback, (sitting paused), it drops to idle or near-idle. Chrome uses much less GPU, as shown in the second graph. The 2nd play was obtained by using the Play Again button. Even though it is slightly higher than the first play, both times through use significantly less GPU resources than Firefox. Both browsers have the latest installation/version of Flash player, and are running on Windows 7 x64 with Windows Aero enabled. The GPU is an Intel integrated card. Rebooting changes nothing. Why the discrepancy?
Firefox
Chrome
No memory graphs, but Chrome’s total usage (with nothing else running) was approximately 1/2 of Firefox’s total usage.
High GPU usage
My Firefox takes up an absurd amount of GPU resources when watching Youtube @ 1080p. It lingers on or about 75%, while Edge(which I had to shelve for completely unrelated issue), used like 35-40% at the same setting(even that is too much, but meh). I installed the h246 codec / thingie, but it doesn’t really help. Turning hardware acceleration also doesn’t really help. What to do? edit: it works just fine when browsing, it’s the 1080p YT that kills the performance.
i5 3470 3,6 GHz(I know, I know)
R9 390 Radeon 8 GB vRAM
FireFox 100% GPU usage — Occurring on Update 86 & 86.0.1
First post on here. Noticing GPU usage spiking up at 100% in task manager Win10 while using firefox version 86. I noticed that my space bar also did not work/register in the youtube search field after updating yesterday so I figured maybe it had to do with the version of firefox.
Updated to firefox version 86.0.1 and the space bar issue does not persist though the 100% firefox usage of GPU does. Occurring on machines with recent nvidia GPU 10, 20 series and 30 series.
Issue:
- Opening firefox — GPU spikes up to 100%
- new webpage like Instagram twiter or youtube- GPU spikes to 100%.
- open a video in youtube GPU spike 100%
The spike is only for a second or two. Is anyone else encountering this behavior with the latest version of firefox? Thanks