Installing a browser has become one of the first (and also one of the most trivial tasks) that users have to do in order to browse the Internet. Unfortunately, depending on the operating system and overall setup, it might be the case that the installed browser will not run with hardware acceleration such that movies, video clips or media in general will have the effect of hogging the CPU up to making the browser unusable.

Perhaps the most affected machines are those that use Intel graphics, which encompasses most laptops or similar micro-PC machines with integrated graphics.

The current trend in IT is to compensate for bad setups and/or programming with physical resources and the former is additionally enforced through forced (or fake) software obsolescence. The most pragmatic example thereof being perhaps more observable on Apple machines where you can have an outdated Macintosh that is still performing from a hardware point of view but the software / API / ABIs are so designed that you would have to throw out your machine for the sake of upgrading to the next operating system.

Typically what you would observe on a machine running Firefox that does not support hardware acceleration is that the videos tear, the browser becomes unresponsive, the CPU is steadily at 100% even though you are watching just a YouTube video.

In order to check for hardware acceleration, open up a Firefox browser tab and navigate to the URL about:support and scroll down to the Media section. In the following screenshot the H264 codec is highlighted and, as can be observed, the codec is followed on one line by SW and HW where SW denotes software rendering and HW denotes hardware rendering respectively.

Fortunately, the H264 HW codec will use the GPU to render H264, yet, it is not a guarantee that websites, in particular YouTube, will deliver videos in H264 format. Youtube, in particular, prefers to send videos encoded in VP8/VP9 format, mainly due to size optimizations however a browser extension such as h264ify can be installed on Firefox in order to force YouTube to deliver videos in H264. Looking at the previous screenshot, there is no support for hardware decoding of VP8/VP9 such that YouTube videos will still be slow without explicitly requesting H264 videos.

One legacy operating system, such as Windows 7, a platform update has to be installed due to Firefox requiring operating system support for Direct2D version 1.1. The update is KB2670838 and can be downloaded directly from Microsoft.

KB2670838 is disabled by the telemetry removal script labeled as "THE EVIL UPDATE" by a user on Microsoft forums due to being a requirement for Internet Explorer 10. The actual detrimental effects reported by the customer are that the taskbar turns turquoise and that it takes a long amount of time to type in Internet Explorer 9, 10 and Chrome 25, which cannot be reproduced, such that the removal of KB2670838 has been commented out in the telemetry removal script.