797346 - Provide friendly hint to update GFX drivers

Status: NEW

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[Benoit Girard (:BenWa)]

I think many users do not know that they are running old drivers or that updating them would improve their experience. I've looked for the driver update on a nvidia lenovo and the UI led me to believe that no updates were available when in fact there was one that fixed my problem.

Perhaps we can provide a very passive hint to update drivers once every 1/6/12 months for drivers we suspect might prevent hardware acceleration? Something such as 'Hint: Update your drivers to improve your browsing experience <Update>' with a link to the nvidia site.

Joe tells me this is complex for Intel chips because some of them may be 'stranded' on old drivers. But likely we can find some conservative heuristics that will block those out.

Comment 1

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

FWIW, the Sony Vaio Z computer (and potentially others like it) use modified version of stock drivers, and updating is non trivial.

f.e., NVIDIA says: http://i.imgur.com/QbUCd.png

and SONY says: http://i.imgur.com/06ocu.png

So here I am, with a 2010-era driver, eating it.

Comment 2

[Benoit Girard (:BenWa)]

Thanks for the info. This is going to be our biggest challenge solving this bug without annoying users who are stuck.

Comment 3

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

Honestly, as long as the message is worded in such a way that says "You may need to get drivers directly from your computer vendor" and we're not annoying about it -- e.g. we record the driver version they're on, notify them once, and only notify them again if the installed version changes (and still isn't good enough).

I think the riskiest thing is the potential for support blowup -- "Firefox told me to upgrade my drivers and now my computer is crashing."

Comment 4

[Emanuel Hoogeveen [:ehoogeveen]]

For Nvidia, I would not expect desktop cards or laptops within their Verde driver program to experience problems when upgrading. For laptops outside that program, however, updating (by using a modified inf) *can* work just fine but shouldn't be considered safe (much less supported). Unfortunately vendors tend to stop updating drivers for their laptops very soon after their initial release. With any luck, *most* laptops not in the Verde program are so old now that they won't get hardware acceleration anyway. There are bound to be some in the 'transition period' though.

I'm not sure how well the above equates to the situation for AMD cards.