Hardware Acceleration Coming to Qt Web Browser ‘Falkon’

A dev commit adds an option to enable this long-requested capability to the Qt-based webkit browser. The option will be available in the next stable release of the browser but it won’t be turned on by default. Users have to explicitly turn it on to benefit.

Why? Well, though hardware acceleration in Falkon works well (for me, and for a few others already using it) it’s not considered 100% robust enough for a wider rollout — not yet.

But with it the feature a mere check-box away, there’ll be wider testing and, hopefully, further contributions to improve it.

Better still, the feature works on both X11 and Wayland.

Enabling hardware acceleration allows the browser to make use of a system’s graphics hardware which, in many cases, results in video content, games, animations that perform more smoothly than when powered by the CPU alone.

Familiar with Falkon?

Popular with Linux users of KDE Plasma desktop, Falkon is a cross-platform web browser also available on Microsoft Windows. The app uses the QtWebEngine for rendering with a Qt5-based GUI on top.

The Falkon Flathub page states “Falkon has all standard functions you expect from a web browser”, including bookmarks, history, tabs, and a built-in AdBlock plugin. Long-time Linux users may remember the app used to be called Qupzilla, but changed its name in 2017.

Gaining (easy to enable) hardware acceleration could help boost its adoption amongst users with more demanding needs from their browser of choice.

So, if you’re looking for a Linux web browser with hardware acceleration support available consider giving Falkon a test-flight when this capability lands in its upcoming release.

Don’t want to wait? You can grab Falkon source code to build right now.

h/t Heimen