Are there any articles that elaborate on what work still needs to be done?
Re:Firefox 57.0 Released
by joshbaptiste on Tuesday November 14, 2017 @11:51PM
(#15701531)
yup.. enabled this option on Linux Mint 17.1, FireFox 51 .. crashed the nouveau driver 10 minutes later.. had to restart.
Implying that it wasn't deliberately disabled. HW acceleration on Linux isn't enabled by default, and for good reason. Until those underlying reasons are changed, Linux does have a hardware-acceleration-on-Firefox problem.