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You missed Webrender. I switched over the firefox a month ago from chrome. While I had tried doing that a few times over the past few years, i came back to chr

You missed Webrender. I switched over the firefox a month ago from chrome. While I had tried doing that a few times over the past few years, i came back to chrome because honestly there was not much difference and chrome just feels like home. This time around I had switched to try out a new tech called 'webrender'. Webrender takes a completely different approach to rendering and compositing, instead of maintainting layers and repainting certain sections it renders and paints content like a game engine. Chrome can get jerky on a 4k monitor with lots of tabs open, but not firefox . With webrender everything is silky smooth. It's so good that I used hacks to also enable it on my intel laptop ( webrender is currently not supported on integrated graphics by default ) and the result is a browser which feels and works smoother than anything that I have experienced before. Everytime I open chrome now it just feels laggy and slow in comparison.

nindalf 8y ago
Webrender is exactly what I was thinking of when I said > [Firefox] ... likely will continue to get better.
MrBuddyCasino 8y ago
Not yet available on Mac it seems.
- samat 8y ago
  I wonder if it is possible to subscribe to something to get an update once it's available in any form on Mac?
  - MrBuddyCasino 8y ago
    There should be a FeatureAlert service that notifies you. People should be able to crowdsource feature requests, and devs would implement the most popular ones.
- pcwalton 8y ago
  It's available on Mac via about:config, on nightly. (All caveats about pre-release software apply.) I've been using WebRender as my daily driver on Mac for months now.
ddalex 8y ago
Any pointers on how to do it?
- opencl 8y ago
  Currently webrender only works on nightly builds unless you have NVIDIA hardware on Windows 10 (not considered mature enough on other hardware/platforms yet). But to enable it you turn on gfx.webrender.all in about:config.
  - apetresc 8y ago
    For NVidia/Win10 users, is it in Stable, or only the beta channel? I have that configuration available but I still don't see the gfx.webrender.all key in about:config.
    - cpeterso 8y ago
      The "gfx.webrender.all" about:config preference to enable WebRender is only available in Firefox Nightly (not Beta or Release channels). The WebRender code exists in Beta and Release and might be randomly enabled for A/B experiments.
    - opencl 8y ago
      https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1432515 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1432515 Going by this bugzilla thread it seems like it should be in stable. But maybe they changed it back. Though the hardware requirement is actually NVIDIA desktop hardware on Windows 10, i.e. laptops are currently excluded. Which is implemented by checking if your computer has a battery.
      - apetresc 8y ago
        Yup, this is an NVidia GTX 1080Ti on a desktop, should've been fine. Based on the other response it looks like the toggle is only on Nightly in Windows too, they're only doing random A/B tests on the other channels. Too bad.
  - 8y ago

nindalf 8y ago

Webrender is exactly what I was thinking of when I said > [Firefox] ... likely will continue to get better.

MrBuddyCasino 8y ago

Not yet available on Mac it seems.

samat 8y ago
I wonder if it is possible to subscribe to something to get an update once it's available in any form on Mac?
- MrBuddyCasino 8y ago
  There should be a FeatureAlert service that notifies you. People should be able to crowdsource feature requests, and devs would implement the most popular ones.
pcwalton 8y ago
It's available on Mac via about:config, on nightly. (All caveats about pre-release software apply.) I've been using WebRender as my daily driver on Mac for months now.

ddalex 8y ago

Any pointers on how to do it?

opencl 8y ago
Currently webrender only works on nightly builds unless you have NVIDIA hardware on Windows 10 (not considered mature enough on other hardware/platforms yet). But to enable it you turn on gfx.webrender.all in about:config.
- apetresc 8y ago
  For NVidia/Win10 users, is it in Stable, or only the beta channel? I have that configuration available but I still don't see the gfx.webrender.all key in about:config.
  - cpeterso 8y ago
    The "gfx.webrender.all" about:config preference to enable WebRender is only available in Firefox Nightly (not Beta or Release channels). The WebRender code exists in Beta and Release and might be randomly enabled for A/B experiments.
  - opencl 8y ago
    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1432515 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1432515 Going by this bugzilla thread it seems like it should be in stable. But maybe they changed it back. Though the hardware requirement is actually NVIDIA desktop hardware on Windows 10, i.e. laptops are currently excluded. Which is implemented by checking if your computer has a battery.
    - apetresc 8y ago
      Yup, this is an NVidia GTX 1080Ti on a desktop, should've been fine. Based on the other response it looks like the toggle is only on Nightly in Windows too, they're only doing random A/B tests on the other channels. Too bad.
- 8y ago