Mozilla Developer Talks Up WGPU As Their WebGPU Implementation In Rust

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mozilla Developer Talks Up WGPU As Their WebGPU Implementation In Rust

Mozilla developer Dzmitry Malyshau has provided an update on WGPU, their implementation of WebGPU built off GFX-RS and Rust for next-gen graphics and compute on the web...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mozilla-WGPU-WebGPU-2020

[Danny3]

I wish Mozilla would stop chasing edge cases and technologies and focus more on practical stuff like implementing as much as possible from HTML5, Wayland integration, hardware decoding for video and audio.
Also they should try to reduce the performance gap between Firefox and Chromium.

[CuriousTommy]

I wish Mozilla would stop chasing edge cases and technologies

I don’t see how WebGPU is an edge case. It is as important (if not more so) as those other issues you listed.

[scirocco]

I wish Mozilla would stop chasing edge cases and technologies and focus more on practical stuff like implementing as much as possible from HTML5, Wayland integration, hardware decoding for video and audio.
Also they should try to reduce the performance gap between Firefox and Chromium.

I agree they need to fix the reason they cant enable graphics acceleration as standard in linux, and what performance gap? I have seen tons of tests with real use cases that firefox load most web pages faster, only in benchmarks it appears slower.

[cl333r]

I wish Mozilla would stop chasing edge cases and technologies and focus more on practical stuff like implementing as much as possible from HTML5, Wayland integration, hardware decoding for video and audio.
Also they should try to reduce the performance gap between Firefox and Chromium.

Oh please stop being reasonable, Mozilla is busy implementing another fluffy Rust solution.

[Danny3]

I agree they need to fix the reason they cant enable graphics acceleration as standard in linux, and what performance gap? I have seen tons of tests with real use cases that firefox load most web pages faster, only in benchmarks it appears slower.

I don't trust myself to much too see this kind of difference. And with good internet it's even harder
The only thing that I noticed for sure is that on Windows 7 Chromium opens faster than Firefox.
Firefox tried a trick to draw the titlebar soon, but the rest of the page is blank for a few moments, so Chromium is better here.
For the rest I trust the benchmarks which is based on math, if it says that Chromium is so much faster, the it is so much faster.
And if you're using a laptop than the performance difference it's even bigger and also way bigger when the laptop get thermal throttling.
So every bit of performance counts and Firefox has a lot to catch up.

[Britoid]

I wish Mozilla would stop chasing edge cases and technologies and focus more on practical stuff like implementing as much as possible from HTML5, Wayland integration, hardware decoding for video and audio.
Also they should try to reduce the performance gap between Firefox and Chromium.

We must be living in different universes because Firefox now enables Wayland by default and there are patches to enable VAAPI under Wayland.

[RahulSundaram]

We must be living in different universes because Firefox now enables Wayland by default and there are patches to enable VAAPI under Wayland.

Both of this is being pushed by the Red Hat developer working on Linux integration. Linux users are a small minority for Firefox. WebGPU is more more of a popular use case than catering to Wayland fixes from the upstream perspective. The only realistic way to influence development at this point is to post patches

[flower]

I wish Mozilla would stop chasing edge cases and technologies and focus more on practical stuff like implementing as much as possible from HTML5, Wayland integration, hardware decoding for video and audio.
Also they should try to reduce the performance gap between Firefox and Chromium.

very true.
i have recently switched to firefox (from chrome) and i dont "feel" any performance regression. and i love the much lower memory and cpu footprint which allows other apps to breathe (which is just a joke from chrome with 32g ram)

[Awesomeness]

Linux users are a small minority for Firefox.

Smaller than macOS? Pretty much every desktop-focused Linux distribution defaults to Firefox (some rebrand it, many disable telemetry). Mac users not only get Safari by default, if they choose to get another browser, there's competition from Chrome as well. I've hardly ever seen a Mac Firefox user in the wild.

Yet, Mac users get pandered to by Mozilla all the time. It's not even like macOS features are a side effect of Firefox on iOS (which I would totally understand) because Firefox on iOS uses WebKit like every other iOS web browser.

IMO Linux distributors should default to different browsers already, like Chromium. Or Falkon. Falkon is working totally fine, offers integration plugins for both Gnome and Plasma.