Firefox 69 Beta On Linux Bringing Better Performance

[silmeth]

webrender (enabled via about:config by toggling gfx.webrender.all) still feels slower on my Intel Kaby Lake on KDE (X11) both with scrolling (with xinput2 enabled, libinput, using touchpad) and the loading of certain pages like reddit. Won't switch until it's noticeably faster.

What is your screen resolution? My impression is that it is expected that WebRender is slower on Intels on UltraHD and that’s why it is not enabled there by default. What I gather the trade-off for most modern computers is that it is better to keep redrawing all the pixels all the time instead of calculating what changed on the website and has to be redrawn on update, but for Intel iGPUs coupled with huge resolutions that’s not the case yet – better to spend some more time on limiting number of pixel to redraw.

See here (We currently have WebRender enabled […] for: […] Linux users on Intel integrated GPUs with Mesa 18.2 or newer with screens smaller than 4K). My own Yoga-900 with 3200x1800 screen has WEBRENDER_QUALIFIED: blocked-screen-too-large by env: Screen too large status under the about:support page.

[molecule-eye]

What is your screen resolution? My impression is that it is expected that WebRender is slower on Intels on UltraHD and that’s why it is not enabled there by default. What I gather the trade-off for most modern computers is that it is better to keep redrawing all the pixels all the time instead of calculating what changed on the website and has to be redrawn on update, but for Intel iGPUs coupled with huge resolutions that’s not the case yet – better to spend some more time on limiting number of pixel to redraw.

See here (We currently have WebRender enabled […] for: […] Linux users on Intel integrated GPUs with Mesa 18.2 or newer with screens smaller than 4K). My own Yoga-900 with 3200x1800 screen has WEBRENDER_QUALIFIED: blocked-screen-too-large by env: Screen too large status under the about:support page.

My screen is only 1440p, but maybe that's too high a res? I'll try it out on my laptop's internal 1080p screen and see if it makes a difference. Perhaps being connected to an external display via HDMI (with internal display off) is also an issue?

[LinAGKar]

Try pressing F11 and refreshing page, it doesn't matter how fast your internet connection is when some things are not paralelized / paralelizable / prefetchable.
When you load phoronix.com from europe for example, you spend half a second transfering html from other side of the planet, then another half a second transfering CSS and few icons.
Half a gigabit troughput or not, loading that 52kB of html takes 600ms and loading that 12kB of css takes another 700ms (waiting for Etag validating the cache to arrive).

While there is not much mozilla can do about that first half a second till server serves initial html, those 700ms of waiting could and perhaps should be spend speculatively using cached css to render page in the background. Out of entire page load, less than 200ms are spend parsing doing javascript and almost all of it is paralelized resulting in time marginally over 100ms.

That's what HTTP/2 Server Push is supposed to help with. The server would bundle the CSS, JavaScript, and images with the HTML, so ideally there would only be one roundtrip.