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We run a sentinel function at startup that detects if the local environment can render the feature. If the sentinel function doesn't complete, then we assume a crash and disable the feature. If the sentinel function completes, but fails to match a known-good rendering, we assume hardware incompatibility and disable the feature or fall back to software. The sentinel function runs again after each Firefox update.
The system is designed so that additional startup tests can be added in the future. The user may be prompted for permission to send telemetry when we detect failures (data collected may include hardware ID, driver version, opengl extensions, and other system info.) In the future, we may add longer-running tests (eg. performance measurements for compute-intensive features like [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1151549 DEAA antialiasing ] ) that the user can opt-in via a UI. A goal is to be able to modify the system and tests using only code that's available in chrome-JS, as doing so enables hotfixes via our add-on distribution mechanisms.
We use all-channel telemetry to detect GPU+driver combinations that are neither whitelisted nor blacklisted but have significant numbers of users, and focus QA on those combinations.
