I'm running 12.04 on an i5 laptop with intel graphics and I noticed last week that webgl no longer worked on chrome. It has in the recent past and I can't think of anything I would have done to break it. I though it was chrome and followed several pieces of advice about setting chrome's flags and gpu blacklists but nothing worked. I have firefox installed but hardly use it so I decided to see if webgl will work with firefox but it doesn't.

So, I think its my gpu, I tried updating the drivers and rebooting but still no webgl.

lspci -v outputs:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
Subsystem: Lenovo Device 3977
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 42
Memory at e0000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
Memory at d0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
I/O ports at 3000 [size=64]
Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
Capabilities: <access denied>
Kernel driver in use: i915
Kernel modules: i915

Looking at chrome://gpu I see:

Graphics Feature Status
Canvas: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
Flash: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
Flash Stage3D: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
Flash Stage3D Baseline profile: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
Compositing: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
Rasterization: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
Threaded Rasterization: Unavailable
Video Decode: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
Video Encode: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
WebGL: Unavailable

And:

Problems Detected
GPU process was unable to boot: GPU process launch failed.
Disabled Features: all
EXT_occlusion_query appears to be buggy with Intel GPUs on Linux
Applied Workarounds: disable_ext_occlusion_query
Clear uniforms before first program use on all platforms: 124764, 349137
Applied Workarounds: clear_uniforms_before_first_program_use
Mesa drivers in Linux handle varyings without static use incorrectly: 333885
Applied Workarounds: count_all_in_varyings_packing
Multisampling is buggy in Intel IvyBridge: 116370
Applied Workarounds: disable_multisampling
Disable partial swaps on linux drivers: 339493
Applied Workarounds: disable_post_sub_buffers_for_onscreen_surfaces

1 Answer

I believe that this graphics card is not supported for WebGL, as per the link below.

Chrome on Linux

• WebGL is enabled on ATI/AMD GPUs with proprietary AMD drivers 8.98 or newer.
• WebGL is enabled on certain Intel GPUs with recent Mesa drivers.
  • Multisampling is disabled on Intel IvyBridge cards.
• WebGL is enabled on NVIDIA GPUs with proprietary NVIDIA drivers newer than 295.
  • WebGL is always disabled on NVIDIA Quadro FX 1500.
  • WebGL is disabled on the dynamically switching NVIDIA+Intel GPUs.

I would be interested in knowing what was different in your environment before when it was working. Perhaps support has been dropped for older intel gpu's, but I was not able to find evidence of that in the linked page's history.