WebRender newsletter
mozillagfx.wordpress.com
mozillagfx.wordpress.com
- Stylo, the new CSS styling engine currently enabled for a percentage of Nightly users
- WebRender, a new GPU-based rendering engine that's currently in much earlier stages
- Quantum, an initiative to improve Firefox's real and perceived performance (there's a bunch of smaller initiatives that compose this, like Quantum Flow and Quantum DOM)
- Photon, a project to redesign and modernise the Firefox UI
Most (but not all) of these projects are aiming to ship with Firefox 57 later this year, but you can check them out now in Nightly. I've been using it for a few weeks and the difference is really night and day, huge props to all the Firefox contributors.
Also, Quantum Flow is not so small! It's actually now the part of Quantum that's getting the highest priority and most resources. It doesn't involved any single component, but is rather a focused effort to relentlessly profile Firefox on real-world workloads and eliminate as many noticeable slowdowns (jank, stutters, pauses, spinning beachballs, etc.) as possible. It's been hugely effective, with noticeable speed-ups in each release from Firefox 54 to 57. Ehsan Akhgari's blog has more details: https://ehsanakhgari.org/blog
Quantum is more general than that: it's a project that aims to vastly improve Gecko through incremental improvement. Some of that involves taking Servo components, but other parts don't. (including Quantum DOM, separating JS runtimes into different threads instead of having one per content process; and Quantum Flow aiming at user-perceived performance).
Do you have any good resources here -- if for nothing else but to feed my, and anybody else's curiosity?
I really hope Servo will be the next generation browser engine.
"gfx.webrender.enabled" enables WebRender and "gfx.webrendest.enabled" toggles on some more advanced features on top of the base level.
webrender is "the stuff that works pretty ok and we can run through CI". In principle enabling webrender should get you the ~same results as not having it on, visually, modulo a few known bugs.
webrendest is "everything we're working on, no matter how broken"
It's a pretty big project so there's lots of stuff in tree that's barely functional (especially true with the layers-free pivot).
I clicked on the Quantum Flow and Photon newsletters and those don't describe what they are at all. I have a general idea of what Quantum Flow is already, but I have no idea what Photon is.