After lagging behind on this front for a long time, Firefox finally offers true support for HDR video on Windows. For users with a compatible display, this update allows for brighter images, deeper blacks, and a wider color gamut—all without having to switch browsers to properly enjoy videos. The anticipation was all the greater because HDR has gradually become the standard in TVs, monitors, laptops, and video platforms, while Firefox continued to render this content primarily through a display chain designed for SDR. Mozilla had already introduced HDR support on macOS, but the situation on Windows was more complex due to the variety of graphics cards, drivers, and compositing mechanisms used by the system.
HDR rollout on Firefox’s main channel
The Firefox browser is available through three main channels. The Stable version is intended for the general public and includes features considered mature enough for everyday use. The Beta version is used to test new features before they are released to the general public. Finally, Nightly is the browser’s most experimental branch. Updated very frequently, it allows Mozilla to evaluate features still in development and gather user feedback. HDR video on Windows was first introduced in Firefox Nightly 148. Volunteer users were able to test the new rendering pipeline and report any issues they encountered.
🤓☝️ Note from the expert
The Beta and Nightly versions of Firefox are intended for advanced users only. Designed for testing, they may contain instability issues, bugs, or security risks and are therefore not recommended for everyday use.
This feature is now available to all users via the Stable channel in version 151. Even after this milestone, development isn’t entirely finished. Mozilla is continuing to improve compatibility, power consumption, handling of various HDR formats, and support for a wide range of graphics scenarios. In particular, certain hybrid laptop configurations that combine an Intel graphics processor with an NVIDIA graphics card are not yet properly supported. On these machines, the image may pass through multiple graphics processors before reaching the screen, which makes it difficult to preserve HDR information throughout the display chain.
The most obvious use case involves video platforms that offer browser-compatible HDR streams, particularly YouTube. With this type of content, the difference isn’t limited to a brighter overall image. Metallic reflections, light sources, sunsets, neon lights, and special effects can appear more intense without obscuring the details in the rest of the scene. Dark areas can also retain more nuance than with standard SDR playback.
🤓☝️ Note from the expert
To use HDR in Firefox, you need to enable HDR in Windows settings. This option is available under System > Display > HDR.
RTX Video: an alternative for SDR content
Owners of NVIDIA RTX graphics cards have another option with RTX Video. This technology uses the Tensor Cores found in RTX GPUs and combines several AI-powered processing tasks. The first, RTX Video Super Resolution, aims to improve the clarity of low-resolution or heavily compressed videos. The algorithm analyzes each frame, sharpens edges, attempts to reconstruct certain details, and reduces blockiness and artifacts caused by compression. On a 1080p video displayed on a 4K screen, the results are impressive. The image generally appears cleaner, more detailed, and better suited to the screen’s high resolution. Obviously, the processing cannot recreate all the information missing from the original file, but it minimizes the blurry or heavily compressed appearance that conventional upscaling can produce.
The second feature, RTX Video HDR, serves a different purpose: converting SDR video to HDR in real time. Instead of displaying content that was actually shot, color-graded, and encoded in HDR, the graphics card uses an artificial intelligence model to enhance the brightness, colors, and contrast of the source. This feature can therefore be applied to videos that were never intended for HDR. It is thus potentially useful for older content, online videos, or files available only in SDR.
However, this conversion is still not as good as true HDR content, as it contains information selected during filming, color grading, and encoding. In contrast, RTX Video HDR must determine which parts of the image should be brighter, which colors can be expanded, and to what extent contrast can be enhanced. The result can sometimes be surprising, particularly in a nighttime scene lit by neon lights, a high-contrast landscape, or a video with numerous reflections. Light sources become brighter, and the image can appear to have added depth.
In other situations, the algorithm takes the processing too far. Whites may appear blown out, some bright areas may lose detail, and colors may become excessively saturated. Skin tones, flat areas, and filmed interfaces are particularly susceptible to this type of exaggeration. The result may also deviate from the source’s visual intent, as the model adds dynamic range that did not exist in the original SDR video. RTX Video HDR should therefore be considered an optional enhancement rather than a true replacement for native HDR.
A feature eagerly awaited by Firefox users
The arrival of HDR video in Firefox is great news for users who have been waiting for this feature for several years. It narrows the gap with other browsers—particularly those based on Chromium—and finally allows users to take full advantage of HDR displays on Windows without having to rely on artificial content conversion. This initial release demonstrates that the underlying technology is now operational on many AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. Firefox can finally display native HDR videos while much more accurately preserving their brightness, contrast, and color space.
