X.Org vs. Wayland Browser Performance With Firefox + Chrome

[kozman]

Both X.org & Wayland may differ, according to the GPU. Using just the CPU's inbuilt GPU may differ. Using different drivers for all GPU's will probably vary.
The other concern is Closed Source corporate-tweaked CHROME is compared to open source FIREFOX. Google Chrome is suspected to have privacy traps, compared to the two open sourced products. These privacy traps may be creating the performance difference. Instead of Chrome, the test should have been done with the other open source product: CHROMIUM.

I agree with much of this. Google has BILLIONS to spend and hundreds of highly paid developers working on making their product better. Not Mozilla. Mozilla has lots of volunteers and more than a few talented developers but nowhere near the resources of Google.

[Hibbelharry]

I don't think he's trolling. X is constantly getting bashed because it's bloated, outdated and such. And yet, you remove X out of the equation, insert the new, modern solution and performance barely moves. It's obvious something doesn't add up.

Multiple things:

At first Wayland isn't just about performance, it's also about security, maintainability and other things. Performance is just one of many aspects. So even if it would fail to deliver on that promise the others might still work.

Second, synthetic browser benchmarks are still crap. They measure some specific workloads that aren't too common to happen when surfing the web. I dislike most all of them, without putting chrome/firefox or X11/wayland/windows, etc into my equation. It's more about real user experience, so compare yourself.

Just one example: In Wayland we'll finally get video acceleration for standard video streams. You'll never see this in the graphs of those benchmarks, but you'll perceive a noticeable benefit.

Third, from michaels sum up:

"The WebXPRT results are quite promising for the Linux desktop on Wayland with better performance compared to the traditional X.Org sessions. The other benchmarks meanwhile generally showed Wayland at least comparable to X.Org and does point towards Firefox having a stronger footing on Wayland at this stage compared to Google Chrome."

After reading the graphs and reading that, I suspect Wayland to deliver on its promise. Some Wayland features and tweaks are also still hidden behind about:config flags in firefox and not activated by default. I suspect Michael tested without using all bells and whistles, and still got good results, so you can expect to get even more performance in the future.

how can I force firefox to run with wayland ?
I am on ubuntu 20.04 with latest firefox 75 from repos
but I still see window protocol x11 in about:support
so how?

MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND="1" firefox

[sdack]

Do people forget that Wayland wasn't about huge performance gains? Like that wasn't why they designed it. It was designed to be a protocol that was designed for the modern computing era that took into account the way the software landscape was, like GUI toolkits and

Wayland is a disappointment and you keep making excuses for it.

[treba]

Mind that there are currently a couple of differences under the hood. FF on Wayland uses GLES instead of GL until bug 1474281 is solved. FF on Xorg again uses GLX instead of EGL until bug 788319 is solved (depends on 1474281). Both backends support partial drawing when using the basic compositor, but neither does when using WR or OGL (actually on Wayland it works for OGL now, but it doesn't help much there). On the long run, the Wayland backend will likely improve even more as it allows similar optimization like its Windows and MacOS pendants, which are not possible with X11 (see bug 1617498). However, these are more about being energy efficient during normal browsing - which AFAIK is not measured in the benchmarks here.

1474281: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1474281
788319: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=788319
1617498: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1617498

[andre30correia]

Im curious to see how edge will performe in summer

[miskol]

Im curious to see how edge will performe in summer

same as chromium. Why do you expect more

[andre30correia]

same as chromium. Why do you expect more

I expect video and hw acc working well, Ms will want to crush the others

[ernstp]

So did these really run on Wayland and not Xwayland? You still have to set variables for Firefox on Wayland afaik

[GNOME_Shill_3.x]

If you decided to stay back on alternative desktops or weird distributions then it is your fault.

GNOME is the default/standard desktop! This needs to be repeated at least 5 times a day. If we say it enough, it will be true!
And yes, we need to say this in threads that have nothing to do with GNOME, or people might forget and use KDE or xfce or something even stranger. Then their computers will spontaneously combust.
If you'd like to thank me for these important PSA's, I have a Patreon account forthcoming.

[lakerssuperman]

The promises of Wayland were more than just absolute performance. Just look at the scrolling in Firefox under Wayland. So smooth. Perceptibly smoother than the Xorg variant which is still verry good these days. Wayland eliminates tearing and provides mechanisms to guarantee frame order and such. Xorg has been great and still does a great job for a lot of things, but Wayland clearly solves a lot of issues that Xorg either doesn't or doesn't without a lot of heavy lifting.

It seems like we've been waiting forever, but Wayland was a massive undertaking and everyone cautioned when Wayland came out that it was going to take a long time to really get Wayland as a viable alternative to X.

The only thing keeping me off Wayland full time is that I use Gnome and the mouse cursor lag is not something I will deal with on a daily basis, but that is a current Gnome architecture thing which is going to be addressed somewhere down the line when they decouple input from the main thread.