Hardware acceleration on Firefox snap

snap
1

Today I saw a Reddit comment mentioning lack of hardware acceleration on the Firefox snap, so I was curious about my own system. And it turns out I’ve been using software rendering all along (which explains a few things actually).

I did check the apt version from the Mozilla PPA, and hardware acceleration worked out of the box :eyes: which confirmed that my hardware is capable.

Then I tried several things with the help of AI assistants and various forums:

  • Force hardware acceleration (gfx.webrender.all and other properties) - set the compositing to WebRender, but it didn’t improve the performance :x:
  • Check the snap connections, plugs, slots - everything was in place already :thinking:

Finally, I figured out that I needed to run the snap based on core24 instead of core22. But I was puzzled when trying to figure out what base was my snap currently running… it’s not displayed in snap info:

$ sudo snap info firefox
name:      firefox
summary:   Mozilla Firefox web browser
publisher: Mozilla✓
store-url: https://snapcraft.io/firefox
contact:   https://support.mozilla.org/kb/file-bug-report-or-feature-request-mozilla
license:   unset
description: |
  Firefox is a powerful, extensible web browser with support for modern web application
  technologies.
commands:
  - firefox
  - firefox.geckodriver
snap-id:      3wdHCAVyZEmYsCMFDE9qt92UV8rC8Wdk
tracking:     latest/stable/ubuntu-25.10
refresh-date: 7 days ago, at 23:29 CET
channels:
  latest/stable:    145.0-2      2025-11-13 (7298) 262MB -
  latest/candidate: 145.0.1-1    2025-11-18 (7366) 262MB -
  latest/beta:      146.0b4-1    2025-11-19 (7377) 264MB -
  latest/edge:      147.0a1      2025-11-19 (7371) 299MB -
  esr/stable:       140.5.0esr-2 2025-11-11 (7279) 258MB -
  esr/candidate:    140.5.0esr-2 2025-11-07 (7279) 258MB -
  esr/beta:         ↑                                    
  esr/edge:         ↑                                    
installed:          145.0-2                 (7298) 262MB -

Then, again with the help of AI, I did

$ sudo snap refresh firefox --channel=latest/candidate/core24

and now my hardware acceleration is working.

This was far from ideal though:

  • As I said, the apt worked out of the box
  • I could not see what base was my snap running
  • The latest/candidate/core24 channel was not there in the list of available channels, wither from snap info or from the website https://snapcraft.io/firefox
  • Since I moved from latest/stable/ubuntu-25.10 to latest/candidate/core24, I don’t know if I broke something else.

Is there any official documentation I should have followed? Anything obvious that I missed?

1 Like
2

snap info firefox --verbose can see the base.

Firefox and chromium snap have stay at core22 for long time, both cant migrate to core24 because some issues in snapd.

As i mentioned in this thread, no one actually have a full pircture about when core24 migration issue will be addressed.

It really hurts snap’s reputation.

2 Likes
3

The latest/candidate/core24 branch is just there for testing purposes, but we are maintaining it until the upgrade issue is resolved. When that branch gets closed, your system will fall back to using latest/candidate which isn’t ideal as you will get updates before they have been through Mozilla’s entire QA process. It’s fine for now, but at some point it would be good to switch back to the appropriate branch for your ubuntu version, such as latest/stable/ubuntu-25.10.

2 Likes