Hacker News Reader

Comment by mostlysimilar | Hacker News Reader

I believe this is related to using scaled resolution in macOS.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042

I was able to achieve way better performance by changing this to `true` in `about:config`:

  gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque

Another note, performance seems way better when changing the following to `true`:

  gfx.webrender.all
  gfx.webrender.enabled

If anyone with deeper understanding of these options has any reasons why this is a bad idea I'm all ears. Otherwise it's made my experience way better.

View on HN

The WebRender team seems to be rolling out very gradually and is, if I remember a recent blog post correctly, restricting based on specific GPUs and specific platforms that are proven to work without e.g. crashing or breaking out various things (like window toolbars).

If you set these options, and then later on, you find that your Firefox is super buggy and won't render anything properly and has weird crashes, it could be because you set these options — and it might take hours or days to realize that.

(And then reverse them, somehow, assuming that gfx.webrender.all hasn't broken about:config!)

Mozilla is very conservative with rollouts, very afraid of user complaints. Of course that is understandable, but I wish they did more cold-turkey YOLO decisions anyway :P At least they should've enabled WebRender for everyone on Nightly and Beta a long time ago.

My daily driver is Firefox Nightly with WebRender + Mesa-git + FreeBSD -CURRENT on a Radeon RX Vega. Haven't seen any GPU related crashes in months, it's very stable actually.

> reverse them, somehow, assuming that gfx.webrender.all hasn't broken about:config

well, safe mode is a thing, but you can also use MOZ_WEBRENDER=1 instead of the about:config prefs.

I did definitely notice much better WebRender performance on Nvidia than on Intel, so I turned off WebRender on the Intel laptop.

I went looking at the WebRender blog and they are apparently still making performance improvements every time they post an update, so make sure to clear your override and let the defaults take effect in a few weeks - either it’ll be better or (I assume) the telemetry data will highlight your OS+GPU+driver pairing as needs-improvement (which it can’t with it force-disabled).

Good idea, yes!

I've heard of this bug on and off for years now. Clearly it's not important to the Firefox team that Firefox is a viable browser on mac. Every other browser / application seems to be able to work around/with the issues described except them.

I took over a month away from other work I have to do to develop the planeshift crate [1] to solve this exact problem. On the WebRender side, tiling work is advancing quickly as well. OS compositing in WR hasn't landed yet, mostly because work has to be done on the legacy Gecko side to wrangle the Cocoa widgets properly, but it's not true that nobody cares.

[1]: https://github.com/pcwalton/planeshift

Thank you for your dedication on this. Now on the subject of energy use, how about the patch for the following critical macOS bug landing in a Firefox 67 point release?

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1551990

Like the bug comments there say (comment 19 in particular), once it's verified that the fix works it will be uplifted to the release branch.

ooh, the code for using Wayland subsurfs for "DirectComposition" is already there! Nice! :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com