4 ms·

WebRender currently (as of the last 2 weeks) renders this correctly, but slowly. Now that correctness is in, they can start looking at speed. Associated bug is

WebRender currently (as of the last 2 weeks) renders this correctly, but slowly. Now that correctness is in, they can start looking at speed. Associated bug is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1525420 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1525420 , but it’s not a blocker for launching WebRender in the first place. And no, this sort of thing isn’t particularly high priority. If lots of websites used these technologies to this extent then it’d be higher up the priority list I’m sure.

coldtea 8y ago
That's the new Rust based render engine?
- robin_reala 8y ago
  Sorry, yes, it’s the Rust GPU rendering (not layout) engine that’s being introduced into release Firefox at the moment. Lin Clark wrote a great article on it 18 months ago: 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... . It should eventually be considerably faster than it is at the moment, but obviously there’s been a bunch of performance work in the previous Firefox rendering engine so currently it’s a clean codebase that’s moderately faster.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    Thanks! That's nice -- does that replace all rendering parts with the new Rust (servo?) equivalents? Or are some parts still in the C++ codebase? (rendering related, not the UI code/JS engine, etc). The diagram on the link seems to imply this is the last part! Does that mean there's some drawing library (akin to Skia) written in Rust used by WebRender too?
    - robin_reala 8y ago
      I’m just an interested observer so handful of salt, but I believe WebRender replaces Moz2D and the old drawing libraries (which included Skia). Honestly, at this point I’m going to defer to pcwalton or whoever’s on HN that’s closer to the project than me.
    - styfle 8y ago
      There is one project I know of that is bringing webrender to desktop apps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18312983 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18312983

coldtea 8y ago

That's the new Rust based render engine?

robin_reala 8y ago
Sorry, yes, it’s the Rust GPU rendering (not layout) engine that’s being introduced into release Firefox at the moment. Lin Clark wrote a great article on it 18 months ago: 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... . It should eventually be considerably faster than it is at the moment, but obviously there’s been a bunch of performance work in the previous Firefox rendering engine so currently it’s a clean codebase that’s moderately faster.
- coldtea 8y ago
  Thanks! That's nice -- does that replace all rendering parts with the new Rust (servo?) equivalents? Or are some parts still in the C++ codebase? (rendering related, not the UI code/JS engine, etc). The diagram on the link seems to imply this is the last part! Does that mean there's some drawing library (akin to Skia) written in Rust used by WebRender too?
  - robin_reala 8y ago
    I’m just an interested observer so handful of salt, but I believe WebRender replaces Moz2D and the old drawing libraries (which included Skia). Honestly, at this point I’m going to defer to pcwalton or whoever’s on HN that’s closer to the project than me.
  - styfle 8y ago
    There is one project I know of that is bringing webrender to desktop apps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18312983 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18312983