If you’re a fan of faster, better, and more, today is your lucky day. We’ve released updates to Flightradar24 that improve performance of Flightradar24.com, enable more data granularity, and enable some exciting future improvements to how we serve and display flight tracking data.
Most of today’s improvements are behind the scenes and not visible to users, but we’ll walk through the ones that are.
Welcome WebGL
The largest change is our introduction of WebGL to render the Flightradar24 website. WebGL is a graphics library that is commonly used across web applications to render animations and in our case, tens of thousands of moving aircraft icons. The vast majority of modern of browsers have built in support for WebGL and the vast majority of users will see a faster, smoother experience.
What’s different?
From the base map up, we’ve changed how the site is rendered, creating a faster, smoother experience. The base maps are now rendered in vector format. This decreases the time it takes to load the maps and makes panning and zooming much quicker. With vector maps, zoom levels have been removed and how zoomed in or zoomed out you want the want is entirely up to you.
Icons and flight paths are now rendered in WebGL, which allows us to display the trail behind the aircraft with increased granularity. You’ll see each data point in the trail clearly, which more data displayed on the ground and when an aircraft is turning.
You’re also now able to manually select the size of the aircraft icon from a slider, enabling minute adjustments to the size of the icons to fit your preferred style.
The transition to WebGL gives us a platform to develop some of the features and improvements that we’re very excited about and we hope to share more about those in the near future.
More data, faster
Across all platforms (web, iOS, and Android), we’ve also introduced an updated flight data stream. This is the information you see when clicking on a flight and opening the flight info panel. Real-time data, like aircraft position, altitude, speed, wind, and temperature were previously updated at 8 second intervals. With the new structure we’ve now reduced that to approximately 2-3 seconds.
Impacts to users with older or unsupported devices and browsers
The vast majority of Flightradar24 users will see immediate benefits from the transition to WebGL. A small number of users may see performance degradation due to older hardware or the use of unsupported browsers. Some users may also receive an error message. We’ve included suggestions for troubleshooting if you receive an error message below.
Please check to see if WebGL is turned on. If it is not turned on, please open this link and read how to turn on WebGL.
Please also enable additional flag for Override Software Rendering List. To do this you can copy and paste this URL: chrome://flags in your search bar and search for Override software rendering list and enable it.
We also suggest that you update your graphics card drivers to the newest available version.
![An example full flight summary response from the Flightradar24 API: { "data": [ { "fr24_id": "0987654321", "flight": "SK1415", "callsign": "SAS1415", "operated_as": "SAS", "painted_as": "SAS", "type": "A20N", "reg": "SE-DOY", "orig_icao": "ESSA", "orig_iata": "ARN", "datetime_takeoff": "2023-01-27T05:15:22", "runway_takeoff": "12R", "dest_icao": "EKCH", "dest_iata": "CPH", "dest_icao_actual": "EPWA", "dest_iata_actual": "WAW", "datetime_landed": "2023-01-27T06:15:10", "runway_landed": "27L", "flight_time": 3600, "actual_distance": 1007.74, "circle_distance": 6245, "category": "Passenger", "hex": "4A91F9", "first_seen": "2023-01-27T05:06:22", "last_seen": "2023-01-27T06:18:10", "flight_ended": "true" } ] }](https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Flight-summary-API-cover-300x148.jpg)
![An example full flight summary response from the Flightradar24 API: { "data": [ { "fr24_id": "0987654321", "flight": "SK1415", "callsign": "SAS1415", "operated_as": "SAS", "painted_as": "SAS", "type": "A20N", "reg": "SE-DOY", "orig_icao": "ESSA", "orig_iata": "ARN", "datetime_takeoff": "2023-01-27T05:15:22", "runway_takeoff": "12R", "dest_icao": "EKCH", "dest_iata": "CPH", "dest_icao_actual": "EPWA", "dest_iata_actual": "WAW", "datetime_landed": "2023-01-27T06:15:10", "runway_landed": "27L", "flight_time": 3600, "actual_distance": 1007.74, "circle_distance": 6245, "category": "Passenger", "hex": "4A91F9", "first_seen": "2023-01-27T05:06:22", "last_seen": "2023-01-27T06:18:10", "flight_ended": "true" } ] }](https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Flight-summary-API-cover-768x378.jpg)
24 Responses
Works much faster, awesome!
Not sure if this was the case in the previous version as well, but I just noticed that when 2 aircrafts are near each other (that it, their labels overlap), depending on what aircraft is selected, the label of second aircraft could render underneath the first label, so it’s obstructed by it.
Insane speed difference, great job guys!
Just seeing if you no how or if you no over to se routs of helicopter or just the police chopper
Not too sure at the moment.
Seem to get some buffering with it even on WiFi.
Hopefully settle down soon.
It wasn’t working for me in Chrome, Edge and Firefox (no planes showing on the map), until I disabled the GPU hardware acceleration in the Chrome and Edge browsers parameters. Still no luck with Firefox though.
My computer is an old DELL PC with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 graphic card.
I hope my comments will be helpfull to other users of FlightRadar24 having the same issues since the transition to WebGL.
Hi Mike, didn’t know about the update until I received this email today. Thought I had been trying to resolve a PC defect especially as it was all ok on my iPhone app. Like you I had no planes showing on the map using either Chrome or Edge browsers. I’m afraid my tech skills were 55/60 years ago so I’m at a loss to resolve the issue, although I have noted what appears to have fixed it for you.
Looks great on one computer, but on my old ThinkCenter M90z I see no planes at all. I’ve tried everything I can think of but they dont show at all anymore.
I still don’t understand why small propeller planes and B737s have bigger icons than larger A320 Family planes. Is there any way to fix this?
No sè nada de aviaciòn, pero me gusta el conocer sobre algo que enriquece mis conocimientos, valga la redundancia. El conocimiento me
apasiona, no importa si no subo a un aviòn nunca. A mis 75 años queda poco tiempo y hay que invertirlo en algo de provecho, asì sea alejando al Sr. Alzhaimer…jajah!! Gracias y feliz dìa.
Thank you very much for the recent improvement !
I do appreciate very much.
I have been totally snookered by the unexpected upgrade and can’t get it to work properly. However, some of the answers here look promising. I’m a Firefox user – so specific helpful advice will be welcome. Thanks.
A big improvement, especially in 3D view – just watched a 787 landing at LGW and it was really smooth, no big jumps along the runway like previously, followed the taxi markings perfectly – superb!
My aeroplanes have completely disappeared and I have no idea what to do about it.
Hi David, please see the troubleshooting tips at the bottom of the post for steps to enable WebGL on your computer. Thanks!
I’m running Ventura on a 2017 MacBook Pro with 136.0.4 FireFox and everything loaded ok
Good upgrade, always have used FlightRadar 24 and think it is great
It is working great. I would like to be able to change the font size for aircraft labels as the labels are too big
To change the aircraft icon size, go to Settings, Map and move to the bottom. You will see Aircraft Icon Size and you can adjust the size.
Please , make the aircraft details panel itself, more customizable:
(1) Allow transparency setting
(2) Allow it to be moved and resized
Good job – keep it up !
GOOD JOB
Flightradar24 is fantastic. Keep up the great work. Wayne.
I was viewing this morning from a Raspberry Pi using the Chromium browser and it complained inocrrectly WebGL was not available, however I got it working by disabling a cloudfront script. I’ve just tried again on a different Pi 5, and didn’t need to do that, but please make sure you check the capability and not just the user agent string.
That is so awesome! Thanks to all those involved in this upgrade. Flightradar24 is the absolute best!!
Fantastic. I love the new zoom settings. I’ve been wanting that for ages.
Can i go to setting for the update??