Gamers know that they have to keep updating their graphic card drivers if they want to get the best performance possible out of their graphic cards to be able to play their games. However, most of the computer users out there are not gamers and have never updated any kind of PC driver because they have never really had any reason to bother.

These are the folks that probably will have problems with Google’s Chrome browser’s hardware acceleration feature. Henry Bridge, Google Chrome product manager, confirmed that “users with old graphics drivers experienced a significant increase in crashes when using these WebGL and GPU-accelerated HTML5 video features.

Developers should continue to ensure that the software-rendered version of their sites work properly for users without GPU-accelerated browsers, so we expect most content to continue to function normally for Google Chrome users with out-of-date drivers — albeit, without the same performance you might expect from Chrome. WebGL content on out-of-date systems will currently not display, but we are working to provide a software path so that these systems can run basic 3D applications.”

Way to go Google … piss off all of the users out there that are running windows XP instead of windows 7. I certainly would not change operating systems when it is so much easier to just use a different browser instead. I have way too many applications that will not run on windows 7 to change the operating system. Plus, the fact is that I would have to either run windows XP in a virtual machine or reinstall all of my apps to run directly on windows 7. Neither of those choices appeals to me.

Hardware acceleration is one of the new core features of modern web browsers, and with that feature comes the necessity to install and run the latest device drivers to avoid the problems that Henry Bridge mentioned.