chrome://settings Enable Hardware Acceleration

[Alecazam]

In the course of fielding a lot of support requests on Figma, this has come up as the major hinderance to WebGL usage by all users.  First it's buried in Advanced Settings..., users don't realize it's even WebGL related, and there's nothing in the name to convey that.  It's worse than the developer flag that Safari used to have that was disabled by default in an obscure menu.  Any possibility instead of causing WebGL to simply fail, Chrome could bring up a dialog suggesting that they enabled that flag or an OK button that would automagically do it?  Pretty please... Ken?

[Kenneth Russell]

That setting should never be disabled. Why is it showing up as a concern? On machines where Chrome has determined that the driver is unstable, it's not that setting that causes WebGL to be disabled, but rather the GPU blacklist. Forcibly bypassing the blacklist requires a different command line flag, not toggling that checkbox.

On Fri, Feb 12, 2016 at 3:33 PM, Alecazam <al...@figma.com> wrote:

In the course of fielding a lot of support requests on Figma, this has come up as the major hinderance to WebGL usage by all users.  First it's buried in Advanced Settings..., users don't realize it's even WebGL related, and there's nothing in the name to convey that.  It's worse than the developer flag that Safari used to have that was disabled by default in an obscure menu.  Any possibility instead of causing WebGL to simply fail, Chrome could bring up a dialog suggesting that they enabled that flag or an OK button that would automagically do it?  Pretty please... Ken?

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[Alecazam]

It's unclear how we have so many users with this flag disabled.  Their GPUs aren't blacklisted.  One guess is that websites were promoting faster browsing or more stability with this disabled.  With it off, they get the message "WebGL could not be initialized..." when they launch our application.   With it on, WebGL works and so does our application.   We try to alert users to this setting, but seems like an issue for all WebGL use. 

[Andre Weissflog]

Interesting, googling for things like "Chrome is slow" brings up journalistic gems like these: 

- http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/how-to/internet/how-turn-off-gpu-hardware-acceleration-in-google-chrome-3605455/

- http://www.cnet.com/how-to/a-quick-fix-for-your-slow-chrome-browser/

Of course after that, WebGL no longer works (at least on OSX) :(

This looks like a UX issue in Chrome, either the checkbox should be removed from advanced settings, or the checkbox should get an explicit warning, or Chrome should show a message bar initializing a WebGL canvas fails because HW accel has been turned off with a clear message and a button to enable HW accel again?

A typical/desperate/naive PC user (such as myself) usually googles for all sort of perf optimizations, messes up stuff like this, or Windows registry settings, and then completely forgets about it.

Cheers,

-Floh.

[Kenneth Russell]

Thanks for the suggestion. Filed http://crbug.com/587872 to track it.

[Alecazam]

I added some notes to the bug, but this is also problematic in that the flag syncs across all machines running Chrome.   So a machine that was previously working can have the flag disabled by sync.