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WebRender is in beta
- markdog12 8y ago> Kats is standing up WebRender in Firefox for Android I'm guessing "standing" should be "setting"? Anyway, doesn't seem to work just yet for nightly. I enabled in about:config, but get "unavailable by runtime: WebRender not ready for use on non-e10s Android". Also, "WEBRENDER_QUALIFIED: blocked by env: Has battery" I filtered by e10s and electrolysis in about:config but couldn't find anything
- robin_reala 8y agoStanding up here means getting into a working but unfinished state. It’s a slightly uncommon turn of phrase, but it’s legit English.
- phkahler 8y agoIs this the opposite of "stand down"? It seems to be.
- singlow 8y agoI think its more like "to erect"; "to stand down" is more like "hold back", "disengage" or "retreat" (intransitive). stand up (intransitive) ~= stand from a sitting or lying position stand up <direct-object> == erect, build, appoint, enact stand-up, upstanding (adjective) == moral, ethical stand-up [comedian] == actually standing on ones feet
- Serow225 8y agoTo me it's very common in the tech community. Maybe a transfer from the embedded/sysadmin/DBA side of things, from what I've seen its usage move over time.
- ergothus 8y agoYou aren't used to hearing about "standing up" new servers?
- Serow225 8y agoI must have written my text poorly, that's what I intended to convey; that in my experience the term's popularity started in the embedded/sysadmin/dba communities and then spread to the wider tech communities. Sorry! :)
- pohl 8y agoI hear this phrase frequently in programming. In order to get your program running, you first have to make it stand up.
- kbutler 8y agoComputer jargon for "set up", likely from (US?) military jargon. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/125681/usage-of-stood-up-to-mean-set-up https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/125681/usage-of-...
- jamienicol 8y agoIt doesn't yet work on fennec (regular Firefox for Android, which is non-e10s). Instead we're working on it for geckoview.
- jamienicol 8y agoTo add to this - this means it could be enabled in focus/klar nightlies, except they don't have an about:config page. You can build it from source, though! It's very early days currently so you're not missing anything, but as it gets more stable I'm sure it'll be easier to try out.
- dochtman 8y agoI keep wondering about GeckoView vs Fennec. Surely Fennec already contains something much like GeckoView, so what will the difference be and when will (Nightly) Fennec switch?
- cpeterso 8y agoGeckoView and Fennec share the same Gecko code, but GeckoView provides an embedding API for other apps and has some runtime differences like enabling e10s (sandboxed content process separate from the app UI). GeckoView-based features (like e10s and WebRender) will eventually be folded back into Fennec.
- antonios 8y agoMe too. A bit of Googling told me that if you set the variable MOZ_WEBRENDER=1 it enables it. That worked.
- markdog12 8y agoThat doesn't seem to work
- cpeterso 8y agoI haven't tried these instructions, but the Android WebRender bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1453367#c13 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1453367#c13 says to download the "geckoview_example" app's APK: https://queue.taskcluster.net/v1/task/AY-d7ns9QOGZuFj3syrsDQ/runs/0/artifacts/public/build/geckoview_example.apk https://queue.taskcluster.net/v1/task/AY-d7ns9QOGZuFj3syrsDQ... and then remotely launch the geckoview_example app from a connected desktop machine: adb shell am start -n org.mozilla.geckoview_example/.GeckoViewActivity --es env0 MOZ_WEBRENDER=1
- Sammi 8y agoMost up to date presentation on WebRender I could find: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXzLC6ArlgE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXzLC6ArlgE Slides: https://github.com/MadRust/talks/blob/master/slides/meetup3_mrobinson.pdf https://github.com/MadRust/talks/blob/master/slides/meetup3_...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- zlynx 8y agoFirefox has become crazy fast lately. Which is great! But on systems like a Surface tablet it seems to chew through battery much faster than Edge. It seems to be pages that are actively modifying themselves. If they just sit there being static the power use isn't a problem.
- rapsey 8y agoDoes it work on macOS atm?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sciurus 8y agoYes, I'm using it in Firefox 65.0a1 on a 15" 2017 MBP running High Sierra. After setting gfx.webrender.all to true and restarting, check about:support and you should see "Compositing: WebRender" Of course you may still hit bugs.
- sandyarmstrong 8y agoI think it's still disabled on beta for Mac laptops, but it could just be that I have an older (2014) MBP than you do.
- dochtman 8y agoThese days I don't see many bugs. I hit a crash this week, but it was fixed within a day.
- polskibus 8y agoOut of curiosity, is WebRender written in Rust?
- dagmx 8y agoYes it is
- proaralyst 8y agoYeah: https://github.com/servo/webrender https://github.com/servo/webrender
- Sammi 8y agohttps://github.com/servo/webrender/tree/master/webrender/src https://github.com/servo/webrender/tree/master/webrender/src
- AriaMinaei 8y agoWondering if Pathfinder made it to this release? Perhaps pcwalton could chime in?
- pcwalton 8y agoIt's in the codebase as an optional code path for fonts but not enabled. The graphics team prefers to do a staged rollout where we roll out WebRender first before enabling Pathfinder. I agree with the caution.
- AriaMinaei 8y agoHappy to hear it's in the codebase. It's an exciting project!
- ammaskartik 8y agoGreat work on this!
- tamasnet 8y agoFor anyone (like me) not familar with WebRender, here's a great writeup: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/the-whole-web-at-maximum-fps-how-webrender-gets-rid-of-jank/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/the-whole-web-at-maximum-f... Also a great read for anyone interested in long-form technical articles that try to serve a wide range of reader types.
- ummonk 8y agoI'd be curious how the power usage compares between this GPU rendering and the old CPU painting / compositing rendering. I'd expect it to save power but could also see it going the other way, particularly for webpages with minimal changes from frame to frame.
- pcwalton 8y agoAt present power usage tends to be worse with WebRender, but I'm working on that with OS compositing (planeshift), and Glenn is working on that with picture caching. I expect it to be an overall energy consumption improvement over the old graphics system once this work is complete, due to reduced overdraw and better use of OS composition.
- danShumway 8y agoThe moment you said put "great writeup" and "hacks.mozilla.org" in the same sentence, I had a feeling it would be Lin Clark. Highly recommend her articles, I've learned a ton about Firefox's internals from her.
- actionscripted 8y agoEnabled in FF Nightly 65.0a1 (2018-10-26) (64-bit) and it felt a little sluggish especially with regards to scrolling. I understand it's in beta but I guess I was expecting things to "feel" faster. Tried resizing larger sites/pages and things felt snappy but scrolling felt jumpy and off. That said, can't wait for this to come out of beta!
- chmln 8y agoI've experienced the exact same thing on latest thunderbird betas and nightlies. Its a shame that GPU support by Mozilla products is in such abysmal state. Meanwhile Google has working hardware accelerated video decoding AND decent GPU support in Chrome.
- kevingadd 8y agoFirefox has had hardware video decoding and GPU support for like 15 years? This is just a new graphics stack.
- gsnedders 8y agoIt doesn't on Linux (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=594876 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=594876).
- chmln 8y agoAs the sibling comment mentions, not on Linux. Perhaps I should've been clearer, but the point still stands.
- pcwalton 8y agoThis is that "GPU support", on Linux anyway. Hardware accelerated video decoding is barely worth it on Linux. Crashes galore. Does Chromium even enable it by default? The problem is not writing the "GPU support", but working around the mountain of Xorg bugs that it triggers. As an example just this week, I recently ripped out OS compositing support from WebRender on X because it was simply impossible to deploy without crashing. (It will still work on X, but energy usage will be worse.)
- aidenn0 8y agoSo soon even more things won't work right due to buggy GPU drivers on linux?
- cztomsik 8y agoI've just made very basic integration with node. It's rather PoC, but it works. It can currently show a window and render moving rect from vue.js template. There's still a lot of work to be done, webrender does too little to be just drop in replacement for electron but it might be worth watching if you're interested in anything like that (lightweight cross-platform opengl-rendered gui apps developed in react/vue/angular/...) https://github.com/cztomsik/node-webrender https://github.com/cztomsik/node-webrender
- Natela 8y agoThis is a nice experiment ! There are a few people starting to hack around with WebRender. There are already Limn, Azul, Stylish, etc...it would be nice if we joined forces in developing one good UI framework powered by WebRender.
- mitchtbaum 8y agohttps://github.com/christolliday/limn https://github.com/christolliday/limn https://github.com/maps4print/azul https://github.com/maps4print/azul https://github.com/Thinkofname/stylish https://github.com/Thinkofname/stylish Here's another: https://github.com/antoyo/servo-gtk https://github.com/antoyo/servo-gtk
- cztomsik 8y agoThanks for those links, azul is very interesting! This is my first rust project, so I'm not sure if I would be any help I also think it's better to have as much GUI part as possible in typescript, try-and-refine cycle is shorter and imagine how it could be with live/hot-reload What I'm trying to do is something like electron but lighter, faster and memory-savvy. I think it could use azul, so thanks a lot :-)
- Natela 8y agoI agree, I think Typescript is a very good pick for UI developpement, it's easy to use yet you still have types that help with maintainability. I would definitely be using something like this to develop apps :). However there are people who prefer other languages so it'd be nice if we could have a WebRender UI framework on which we could write bindings for any language, similarly to QT and GTK that have bindings for several languages.
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- JoshuaAshton 8y ago"Bobby fixed a crash" - A crash relating to what? This changelog is awful, who approved this?
- dralley 8y agoIt's a changelog for prerelease software, the standards are a bit lower.
- Manishearth 8y agoThis isn't a changelog, this is a newsletter for folks wanting to keep up with development.
- stcredzero 8y agoIs GPU rendering going to open up new security holes? If not, then how do we know it won't?
- pcwalton 8y agoCan you be more specific as to which "security holes" you're thinking of? You're kind of asking to prove a negative.
- stcredzero 8y agoNot at all. I'm asking what the current approach and what the current thinking is about this topic.
- jadbox 8y agoFor pages like Facebook and Reddit, the performance is great. But Chrome is almost double the framerate for svg animations (I measured on a Macbook).
- pcwalton 8y agoWebRender doesn't accelerate SVG yet. That will be the second stage of the Pathfinder work. Stay tuned :)