Mozilla Begins Slowly Enabling WebRender For Some Users

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mozilla Begins Slowly Enabling WebRender For Some Users

One of the Mozilla technologies we have been most excited about in recent years is WebRender, the Rust-written restructuring of the graphics/GPU code...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=WebRender-Slowly-Turning-On

[treba]

This is really great news! I hope with this, they will finally be able to generally enable accelerated rendering on linux. As far as I understand, webrender is more modeled like a modern 3d game engine (instead of the classic 2d approaches), therefore using driver paths that are overall more tested, stable and less bug prone. So there's hope that around Q1 2019 they do the same on linux!

And then they might finally make hw video acceleration on linux a reality

[Anvil]

This is really great news! I hope with this, they will finally be able to generally enable accelerated rendering on linux. As far as I understand, webrender is more modeled like a modern 3d game engine (instead of the classic 2d approaches), therefore using driver paths that are overall more tested, stable and less bug prone. So there's hope that around Q1 2019 they do the same on linux!

And then they might finally make hw video acceleration on linux a reality

its basically only gonna be for Windows, the Graphics stack on windows is far better than Linux will ever be, so Mozilla enabling WR by Default on Linux will take a lot longer i would think.

[petra]

I have been testing it out on macos and have been very impressed.

[petra]

I have tried nightly with webrender enables on macos el capitain on a macbook mid 2009 and i am very impressed with the difference in rendering.

[boxie]

...the Graphics stack on windows is far better than Linux will ever be...

I dunno about that, Linux already has a much better OpenGL implementation and Vulkan is doing rather well too. The OSS graphics driver effort over the last couple of years has been pretty fantastic

[treba]

its basically only gonna be for Windows, the Graphics stack on windows is far better than Linux will ever be, so Mozilla enabling WR by Default on Linux will take a lot longer i would think.

While I agree on that concerning direct2d vs opengl in firefox today, AFAIK webrender uses opengl everywhere (although they at least consider switching to gfx-rs). So concerning users using the proprietary nvidia driver, the difference shouldn't be that big between windows and linux. Secondly, radeonsi is better than the proprietary amd opengl driver on windows. Therefore it should actually be easier to support amd on linux than on windows or mac. And the mesa intel drivers are also better than the mac os drivers. I might be wrong, but I thought that this is also a reason why valve doesn't support proton on mac atm.

[pal666]

the Graphics stack on windows is far better than Linux will ever be

who is your dealer?

[Anvil]

who is your dealer?

Donald Trump

[TemplarGR]

its basically only gonna be for Windows, the Graphics stack on windows is far better than Linux will ever be, so Mozilla enabling WR by Default on Linux will take a lot longer i would think.

There is some truth in that statement. Indeed the graphics stack on windows is better than Linux currently, and it has always been this way for decades, let's not hide behind our fingers here.

But the GNU/Linux ecosystem has been improving by leaps and bounds the last decade, and the graphics stack is much, much improved and can support stuff that Windows do.

The major remaining piece of the puzzle is proper Wayland compositors, because current compositors are essentially alpha software. Once Wayland becomes production ready and becomes the default protocol for Linux systems, the Linux stack will be essentially pretty close to the Windows stack. MESA drivers are becoming really good and feature complete.