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”.

Google as a consequence has added “ranges of old drivers to Google Chrome’s software rendering list”. This means that users with hardware acceleration compatible hardware cannot use the feature because the drivers they have installed on their systems are outdated and thus blacklisted.

Google recommends that users should use the latest major version of their operating system and install the latest device drivers that are available for the computer.

Recommending the latest major version of the operating system could severely irritate Chrome users who run an older version. Windows XP for instance is still by far the most used version of Windows, and asking XP users to update to Windows 7 to use hardware acceleration in Chrome could convince some to make the easier change to another web browser instead.

The second recommendation, to update device drivers, is recommended by all browser developers. The process is not complicated as long as one knows which hardware is installed on the system and where to download the latest drivers.

The core problem, at least on Windows, is that the operating system does not offer a repository for all drivers, which leaves Windows users with no other choice than to download and install the drivers manually.

The following links lead to websites where the latest device drivers can be downloaded:

• ATI Drivers
• NVIDIA Drivers
• Intel Drivers

Free and commercial driver updating tools are available which can simplify the updating process. Most are however known to produce false positives as well which means that the programs need to be used with caution. We have reviewed some here: Windows Driver Updates.

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 in the blog posting.

A software that would handle all of these would be more than welcome. There is unfortunately no official one. A few third party tools have been released in the past that have tried to address the problem; Most of them with mediocre success thanks to the amount of devices and drivers available.

Device Doctor promises to do better. The free program scans Windows for driver updates and displays information and download links in a report at the end of the scan. And this is where the confusion starts. Device Doctor mixes update notifications of devices like video cards, sound cards or network cards with internal device driver updates like those for standard dual channel PCI controllers or a plug and play monitor.

The software did find updates for several devices like the Realtek network adapter or the Creative Soundblaster X-Fi audio card. The manufacturer’s website confirmed that updates were available.

It does make sense to check the manufacturer’s homepage before installing these driver updates; At least for the first few times that Device Doctor is being used. There is still the lingering question whether to update the generic hardware drivers as well. I personally would be very cautious about it. Decided against it on the test system but some users who might experience problems related to a specific device on their computer system might want to give it a go to see if the update fixes the problem.

Device Doctor is available at the developer’s website.

Anyway, some free programs to update Windows drivers exist. We have reviewed Driver Max in the past. The application has made some leaps version wise. It can not only be used to scan for Windows driver updates but also to identify unknown hardware or to perform device driver backups. A click on the check for driver updates button in the updates and identification category will start the scan of the computer system’s hardware.

The results will be displayed on the website of the software developer in table form listing the name of the device as well as the installed version and the latest version in the database. A disk symbol at the end of each line leads directly to the download of the device driver.

The download pages list all downloads for the selected device. There is no mentioning if the drivers are alpha, beta or final drivers and it is recommended to perform a search on a search engine to verify the result. The suggested update for the outdated Intel Chipset Software Installation on the test system turned out to be an alpha driver. A quick search revealed a final driver that was available for download.

The list of downloads could use some filtering options to filter languages and alpha or beta drivers. Still, it is a better alternative than searching for all device driver updates manually. It will at least list the drivers that are not up to date anymore which will narrow down the manual process to a minimum. A free registration is required to use the program.

A similar program is 3DP Chip (read: Computer Driver Updates) which will only scan the most important components of a computer system.

Computer driver updates are usually available on the homepage of the manufacturer from where they can be downloaded. Many new drivers fix stability issues, increase performance or add new functions that previous drivers did not offer.

3DP Chip is a free portable software program for Windows that displays information about the central computer hardware. It concentrates on the processor, mother board, video card, sound car and network adapter.

A click on the Driver button will open the website of the software developer containing a link to the latest computer driver made by the manufacturer of the hardware device. A check revealed that the latest drivers for all five components was available on the homepage.

Downloads are available directly for various Windows operating systems on the landing page which means that the software provides effective means to update the computer drivers.