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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

> WebRender will roll out to Windows 10 users with AMD graphics cards.

This sounds awesome:

https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2019/05/21/graphics-team-sh...

> WebRender is a major rewrite of the Firefox rendering architecture using the same kind of GPU-based acceleration techniques used by games.

I really hope it gets pushed to other Operating Systems as well in the future.

Edit: Here's the link to their hacks mozilla blog post about WebRender Interestingly this piece of tech is from Servo:

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/the-whole-web-at-maximum-f...

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> Windows 10 users with AMD graphics cards

It may be worth noting that WebRender was already deployed to Win10/Nvidia users in Firefox 67.

Ah I didn't know this, that makes more sense, I guess they wanted to isolate such a release by GPU to resolve immediate issues per release.

Will it also eventually roll out for those with Intel Integrated Graphics?

Eventually… https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1479781

You can enable/disable webrender in about:config if you want to try it out (gfx.webrender.all). I've switched to it on my laptop (HD Graphics 620, Gentoo Linux). So far so good.

On my case that just results in a black page for every site.

Confirmed, Ubuntu 16.04 on dell xps works fine, and the added boost in perf is noticeable (or the placebo effect is not).

Webrender will by the default everywhere ... eventually.

Mozilla is just using a conservative, staged rollout to limit the impact of bugs.

You can force-enable it in about:config:

    gfx.webrender.enabled
    gfx.webrender.all

Works fine on my HD4600.

It's for Linux also. From the article:

"We currently have WebRender enabled in Nightly for:

* Recent Intel and AMD GPUs on Windows 10 desktops

* Linux users on Intel integrated GPUs with Mesa 18.2 or newer with screens smaller than 4K"

That's nightly though.

It's a shame it hasn't made it over to Mac yet - graphics card options are a lot more limited there so you'd figure it would be easier to support. But I suppose it's a much smaller market share.

There is a known severe performance issue on MacBooks with retina screens and integrated Intel graphics which this is suppose to be the solution to. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to have driven macOS to be a priority for the rollout.

macOS never seems to be a priority at Mozilla, which kind of sucks. Another power management issue is video decoding. Even when I force YouTube to play .mp4 instead of VP9, my battery use is still 2-3x higher on Firefox than Safari, despite H264 acceleration being easily available via VideoToolBox, and VideoToolBox has been available since 2011 (Lion) or 2012 (Mountain Lion).

MacOS uses an absolutely decrepit version of OpenGL and a special vendor-locked graphics API (Metal) that nobody else uses.

It's not surprising they get low-priority when Apple makes it a pain to do write a crossplatform app that is supported on their platform.

gfx-rs is a project to provide graphics APIs in Rust, supports Metal as a backend, and there is active work to make WebRender/Firefox work with it.

https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx

https://github.com/szeged/webrender/issues/198

I also love the new Firefox Preview on Android, which I believe is the first time that it uses the "Quantum" improvements. I can't really decide if I like the speed or the new design more, though. I like that the private mode can be permanently enabled/disabled with a tap and how tabs are now presented in it. Still looking forward for extensions to be supported.

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