Firefox Developers Still Hesitant About Using EGL Over GLX On X11 Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Firefox Developers Still Hesitant About Using EGL Over GLX On X11 Linux

While Wayland support depends upon EGL and there has been EGL support within Mesa and the other graphics drivers on Linux for a number of years now, Firefox developers are still hesitant about shipping EGL support by default for Firefox on X11...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-EGL-2018-Performance

[uid313]

Martin Stransky is the guy working on bringing Firefox to Wayland. It seems like he pretty much is single-handily responsible for bringing Firefox to Wayland.

[R41N3R]

It's a pity how Mozilla supports Linux... GPU acceleration disabled by default, EGL not supported by build, touchscreen scrolling doesn't work by default and yes Wayland support seems to be a one man show.

[Gusar]

Why do I have the feeling they're actually comparing GLES vs desktop GL, not EGL vs GLX?

[Venemo]

Why do I have the feeling they're actually comparing GLES vs desktop GL, not EGL vs GLX?

Because it is hard to explain in non-technical terms what the difference is between GLX, EGL and GLES. In fact, I know GLES is basically the embedded specification intended for mobile devices, but I don't know what exactly EGL is.

[cl333r]

It's a pity how Mozilla supports Linux... GPU acceleration disabled by default, EGL not supported by build, touchscreen scrolling doesn't work by default and yes Wayland support seems to be a one man show.

And some people (idiots) still say market share doesn't matter.

[Anvil]

Mozilla dont really care for Linux much as there main userbase is Windows.

[Gusar]

Because it is hard to explain in non-technical terms what the difference is between GLX, EGL and GLES. In fact, I know GLES is basically the embedded specification intended for mobile devices, but I don't know what exactly EGL is.

These people are software developers. They bloddy well should know. End users don't really need to.

EGL and GLX are interfaces to the windowing system (X, Wayland, Android SurfaceFlinger, macOS, Windows, etc). There are windowing system specific ones (GLX is tied to X, WGL is tied to Windows, CGL is tied to macOS). And then there's EGL, which was meant to be universal, though in practice you still need system specific code when using EGL.

GLES and desktop GL are, as you point out, specifications. They specify functionality that's available to application developers to render or compute things (that's maybe a bit too simplified, but oh well), and that has to be provided by the hardware and driver.

[starshipeleven]

Because it is hard to explain in non-technical terms what the difference is between GLX, EGL and GLES. In fact, I know GLES is basically the embedded specification intended for mobile devices, but I don't know what exactly EGL is.

EGL is an interface to send over graphics buffers (i.e. rendered images) to be composed or shown on screen.
See what I posted here. https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...19#post1026619

[schmidtbag]

I don't get it... Firefox has all sorts of known hardware acceleration issues in Linux, and yet this guy is hesitant about EGL because of some outdated and currently ambiguous performance results? Is it really that hard to do another modern test, and analyze why it's slower (if it still is)? That doesn't sound like too much to ask...
I don't know how much of a performance impact EGL has over GLX (whether good or bad), but I doubt it should be enough to drag down Firefox enough to prevent using EGL, unless improperly implemented.