673490 - Show reason for black listing in about:support

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1801780

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[Benoit Girard (:BenWa)]

The rule for disabling acceleration/webgl are not trivial. about:support only tells you that the feature is disabled, it doesn't tell you why.

I think it would help us support users if we shown a message to explain which check failed in about:support. At the very least an error message string that a developer can understand. Something like:
"Unknown hardware vendor"
"Outdated driver version"
"Video card model not support"

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drivers

Is this something we care to implement?

Comment 1

[Benoit Girard (:BenWa)]

Bug 621741 comment #5 is an example of a use case for this.

Comment 2

[Benoit Jacob [:bjacob] (mostly away)]

Was bug 642502 not enough? What version of Firefox are you talking about? Stuff got checked in early May.

I agree though that the link to https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drivers would be a nice addition, but I don't know how to add links in about:support.

Comment 3

[Benoit Girard (:BenWa)]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Was bug 642502 not enough? What version of Firefox are you talking about?
> Stuff got checked in early May.
> 

I didn't know about bug 642502, awesome! I don't really mind if the URL is there or not. Feel free to close the bug if we don't want the URL added.

Comment 4

[:aceman]

It seems fixes in bug 642502 were not enough.
There are still netbooks with cards today (like Intel 945 graphics) where everything seems enabled (on XP), but Direct3D 9 layers are not used. It is supposedly due to texture size on these cards. But this info is not shown on about:support.
I'd vote for showing that link too.

Comment 5

[:aceman]

(In reply to :aceman from comment #4)
> I'd vote for showing that link too.

But that is bug 684737.

Comment 6

[Jukka Jylänki]

It would be great to leave a bugzilla URL trail to get clear 'why' understanding.

I am running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS in a Virtualbox VM on a Mac Pro (Late 2013) host OS, I am getting about:support as follows:

Graphics
Features
Compositing	Basic
Asynchronous Pan/Zoom	wheel input enabled
Hardware H264 Decoding	No; Failed to create H264 decoder
GPU #1
Active	Yes
Description	Humper -- Chromium
Vendor ID	Humper
Device ID	Chromium
Driver Version	2.1 Chromium 1.9
Diagnostics
AzureCanvasAccelerated	0
AzureCanvasBackend	skia
AzureContentBackend	cairo
AzureFallbackCanvasBackend	none
CairoUseXRender	0
webglRendererMessage	Blocked for your graphics card because of unresolved driver issues.
Decision Log
HW_COMPOSITING	
blocked by default: Acceleration blocked by platform

but no further information is given what these unresolved driver issues were that forced GL acceleration to be disabled. Given that this is modern hardware with modern OS, one naturally ponders whether these "unresolved driver issues" would still be present or not, and why exactly is this system affected. Having the bugzilla number to explain the reasoning would help a lot here.