Firefox's Linuxy Hardware Acceleration Problem

Linux and Firefox have long been a winning combination, but recently a snag came up that threw their future into question. Firefox 4's much-anticipated hardware acceleration features were evident in the ninth beta -- but not on Linux. "We tried enabling OpenGL on Linux, and discovered that most Linux drivers are so disastrously buggy (think 'crash the X server at the drop of a hat, and paint incorrectly the rest of the time' buggy) that we had to disable it for now," wrote Mozilla developer Boris Zbarsky recently in a comment on the Mozilla Hacks blog.