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I believe this is related to using scaled resolution in macOS. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?i

I believe this is related to using scaled resolution in macOS. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 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.

floatingatoll 7y ago
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!)
- chronogram 7y ago
  I did definitely notice much better WebRender performance on Nvidia than on Intel, so I turned off WebRender on the Intel laptop.
  - floatingatoll 7y ago
    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).
    - chronogram 7y ago
      Good idea, yes!
- floatboth 7y ago
  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.
tick_tock_tick 7y ago
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.
- pcwalton 7y ago
  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 https://github.com/pcwalton/planeshift
  - brymaster 7y ago
    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 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1551990
    - bzbarsky 7y ago
      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.
  - floatboth 7y ago
    ooh, the code for using Wayland subsurfs for "DirectComposition" is already there! Nice! :)

floatingatoll 7y ago

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!)

chronogram 7y ago
I did definitely notice much better WebRender performance on Nvidia than on Intel, so I turned off WebRender on the Intel laptop.
- floatingatoll 7y ago
  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).
  - chronogram 7y ago
    Good idea, yes!
floatboth 7y ago
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.

tick_tock_tick 7y ago

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.

pcwalton 7y ago
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 https://github.com/pcwalton/planeshift
- brymaster 7y ago
  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 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1551990
  - bzbarsky 7y ago
    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.
- floatboth 7y ago
  ooh, the code for using Wayland subsurfs for "DirectComposition" is already there! Nice! :)