Hardware acceleration is disabled by default because many graphics drivers suck and will break the browser if hardware acceleration is turned on. You can just go into the settings and turn it on (and then off, if you have problems).

Chromium disables hardware acceleration by default for a wide swatch of graphics drivers too (including all Nvidia GPUs).

On my current Linux system with NVidia drivers, HW acceleration is enabled according to chrome://gpu (there are many accelerations and some are disabled, but many are enabled including Canvas and Compositing). Regardless of all, Chromium works just great, including smooth scrolling and WebGL, and Firefox doesn't (laggy scrolling, slower WebGL than in Chromium). I don't think the problem is with drivers but with Firefox.

> Chromium disables hardware acceleration by default for a wide swatch of graphics drivers too (including all Nvidia GPUs).

From what I remember reading, it disables it for nouveau driver, not the NVidia driver which works. This is supported by the fact my Chromium is currently using HW accel on NVidia without me having forced anything.

I did try enabling HW accel in Firefox and it did not solve laggy scrolling. I don't think it even really got enabled, I think it's forcibly disabled even if you try to override it.

you're correct, it's definitely just nouveau that's blacklisted, not the proprietary nvidia driver.

Chromium also has hw accel enabled by default for intel drivers, which is by far the most used gpu driver on linux (and is pretty stable in my experience). Firefox doesn't even have it enabled for intel

Firefox has an option to uncheck Smooth Scrolling. So if you press the spacebar, the page instantly jumps down instead of showing the page quickly scroll. I don't know if this would help.

This is the exact reason I have not been able to switch back to FF, but on Windows. Enabling HW acceleration did not fix it.

I'm using FF on AMD and Intel GPUs, and works smooth