Enable WebGL technology in Firefox 4+

[Monsie]

Hi all,

The development of WebGL technology has been going on for just over a year now --version 1.0 has been out this long. Most newer browsers support it including: Firefox 4+, Chrome 9+, and Opera 11. This technology (web based graphics library) provides 3D graphics support within the browser. This will (for example) eventually make it possible to play games that require such performance on-line... that is to say: within the browser. What this means is that many games will become cross-platform... without having to be played within Wine or ported to a specific operating system --my prediction.

Here is a recent how-to article re: how to enable WebGL in Firefox for those who are running newer computers (not older than 5 years old) with decent graphics hardware. You must be running Firefox 4 or newer to benefit from this.

Cheers,
Monsie

[Monsie]

Hi all,

Here's an update to my post yesterday. It appears that when I first looked at the article about enabling WebGL settings in Firefox, I missed the jist of the written piece, and that was to explain how one could enable webgl for graphics hardware that Mozilla devlopers had previously blacklisted when working on this browser feature. It turns out that when skimming through dozens of the latest technology articles in a morning session (as I like to do whenever I have time), I sometimes miss the important stuff...

Anyhow, it turns out that WebGL must be enabled in Firefox 4, but in versions 5 and later it is actually enabled by default. However, if you do happen to have an older video card that performs well, but would have been blacklisted by Mozilla developers who were erring on the side of caution --so to speak-- then you need to enable the webgl.force setting to "true" then test it at: http://get.webgl.org/ to see if the feature will work with your graphics hardware or not.

Note that the WebGL technology is also available in SeaMonkey 2xx.
Here are a couple of screenshots. The first one shows WebGL support in SeaMonkey 2.61 on my Wary desktop. Since this computer is an old Pentium 3, I should probably toggle the setting to disable WebGL support as I am pretty sure that it will be of no benefit to me given my old ATI Rage 128 16mb video card. The second screenshot shows WebGL settings in Firefox 11 on my Debian desktop --I still have to test the feature... not sure if it is new enough hardware to handle the spec or not.

Cheers,
Monsie