Open Bug 879124 Opened 12 years ago Updated 3 years ago

A background tab using WebGL should not keep the discrete graphics card active

Categories

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Product:
Core
Component:
Graphics
Platform:
x86_64
macOS
Type:
defect

Tracking

()

People

(Reporter: jruderman, Unassigned)

Details

(Whiteboard: [battery])

I left Google Maps in a background tab for a long time. Firefox didn't let my Mac back into integrated-graphics mode until after I closed the tab (and GCed). (Using Firefox Nightly 24 on Mac OS X 10.8.3, with gfxCardStatus informing me. My Early 2011 15" MacBook Pro has [Intel] integrated and [AMD Radeon] discrete cards.)
It's unfortunate but applications have to pay special attention to support switching GPU. They have to handle resource switch or do something like only use common denominal feature. We don't expose the right APIs for web content to support the GPU switch so this isn't something we can do without a sizable effort. Apple also mentioned that we shouldn't expose GPU switching to web content but they didn't elaborate as to why. If one of those reasons is driver security then it could be scary.
How many things would explode if Firefox just killed the WebGL context until I switch back to the Google Maps tab? Web content has to deal with that for memory pressure anyway, right?
Severity: normal → S3
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