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Josh, been really appreciating the quality of your posts. Enjoy how you break down what's happening and also throw in some "fun facts" of the reasons why somet

Josh, been really appreciating the quality of your posts. Enjoy how you break down what's happening and also throw in some "fun facts" of the reasons why something came to be. Like the will-transform property, have always used it but didn't realize it came out of people hacking the transform3D property to get GPU acceleration

chrismorgan 6y ago
I dislike the will-change property and wish they’d left it at the obviously-a-hack `transform: translateZ(0)`, because the whole thing should simply not be necessary—everything should be rendered on the GPU, and that’s the clear way forward; formalising the will-change property legitimised the prevailing architecture at a time when Servo had already demonstrated with WebRender that it was possible to do better; and so Firefox now uses WebRender and does all rendering on the GPU (on most platforms), so that will-change is, I think, simply rendered obsolete (except for platforms that it can’t yet GPU-render on, because GPUs and their drivers are so awful). See 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... for more info on the whole WebRender performance thing.
- djsavvy 6y ago
  That link to `hacks.mozilla.org` is 404ing for me, and even the link after a quick web search was 404ing. Is there something wrong on Mozilla's end?
  - chrismorgan 6y ago
    Looks like they just now changed their URL format to remove the year and month, and broke all existing links. Bleh. Looks like someone reported this at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1695431 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1695431. For now, https://hacks.mozilla.org/the-whole-web-at-maximum-fps-how-webrender-gets-rid-of-jank/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/the-whole-web-at-maximum-fps-how-w... works.

chrismorgan 6y ago

I dislike the will-change property and wish they’d left it at the obviously-a-hack `transform: translateZ(0)`, because the whole thing should simply not be necessary—everything should be rendered on the GPU, and that’s the clear way forward; formalising the will-change property legitimised the prevailing architecture at a time when Servo had already demonstrated with WebRender that it was possible to do better; and so Firefox now uses WebRender and does all rendering on the GPU (on most platforms), so that will-change is, I think, simply rendered obsolete (except for platforms that it can’t yet GPU-render on, because GPUs and their drivers are so awful). See 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... for more info on the whole WebRender performance thing.

djsavvy 6y ago
That link to `hacks.mozilla.org` is 404ing for me, and even the link after a quick web search was 404ing. Is there something wrong on Mozilla's end?
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  Looks like they just now changed their URL format to remove the year and month, and broke all existing links. Bleh. Looks like someone reported this at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1695431 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1695431. For now, https://hacks.mozilla.org/the-whole-web-at-maximum-fps-how-webrender-gets-rid-of-jank/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/the-whole-web-at-maximum-fps-how-w... works.