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**ivan.cwb** · 17 November 2020, 01:14 PM

The only thing is missing for me on Firefox is 100% hardware-decoding for video... It's kind-of-working, but I still have some problems with multi-gpu.

Besides that, I'm pretty satisfied with Firefox performance for some time...

**treba** · 17 November 2020, 02:23 PM

Looks like 84 will be the first release to enable Webrender for a subset of users on release, with 85 expected to expand that number. Also the Wayland and EGL-on-X11 backends are getting close to get shipped by default (maybe EGL-on-X11 will ship on 85). Finally great out-of-the-box performance

**Linux_Chemist** · 17 November 2020, 03:22 PM

The https-only mode was a simple but effective step - making it so you are effectively always browsing via https unless you click that you intend for a page not to be - and effectively removes the need for "https everywhere" and the like (cutting out a middleman so to speak). It makes it more likely that the internet landscape will hit 100% https in the foreseeable.

Still, I don't think there's much to be excited about with firefox...hasn't been for a longwhile but it continues to hang on which counts for something.

The webbrowser scene could do with a big shakeup (and perhaps that might happen this decade

) but it would take a new player with significant resources to keep up on today's playing field - and to be worth it, they'd have to take the best bits of firefox, have hardware acceleration etc all sorted, and unlike the others, not try to thwart/resist or slither around adblocking or remove so much customisability and user control to tweak.

**uid313** · 17 November 2020, 04:21 PM

Originally posted by ivan.cwb View Post

The only thing is missing for me on Firefox is 100% hardware-decoding for video... It's kind-of-working, but I still have some problems with multi-gpu.

Besides that, I'm pretty satisfied with Firefox performance for some time...

As a web developer there still some things missing:

HTML dialog element.
CSS font-family "system-ui".
JavaScript ES6 class private fields.
Toggle in devtools for prefer-color-scheme CSS media query, to easily toggle dark mode.

Chrome 87 just got released with WebAuthn support in devtools.
I am quite content with my real world performance of Firefox, however benchmarks show that Chrome is usually much faster.

I recently had some performance problems with Firefox, just changing tabs took a long time, but I solved it by clearing the cache, and going to about: preferences#privacy and clicking on "Manage Data" and manually deleting some cookies. Some domains such as YouTube had 100+ cookies, and some domains such as YouTube had multi-megabyte cookies like 8,6 MB.

Originally posted by Linux_Chemist View Post

Still, I don't think there's much to be excited about with firefox...hasn't been for a longwhile but it continues to hang on which counts for something.

Firefox is rolling out Pocket to more users which presents articles in the new tab page. The quality of articles is much better than the articles presented in new tab on Microsoft Edge. I haven't seen much of any political bias yet, so it seems to be actually rather good.
Firefox is also gradually getting more code written in Rust. It was nice to see the JavaScript "Warp" improvements in this release.

**arQon** · 17 November 2020, 05:18 PM

Originally posted by treba View Post

Looks like 84 will be the first release to enable Webrender for a subset of users on release, with 85 expected to expand that number.

oh? My impression of WebRender on Linux is that the FF team's position is more like "if you have exactly this GPU, then maybe", but not much more than that. The HW-exclusion list seems to be almost infinitely large, with no reasoning behind it other than "well, we haven't tested this specific device" rather than simply assessing a device's capabilities, all of which are well-defined and have been exposed for a very long time now.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the situation, since none of my machines seem slow enough anyway for me to care about trying out WebRender, since I don't benchmark browsers and don't care about single-digit performance improvements. But I've lost track of how many YEARS it's been since the "WebRender will make everything sooo much better" hype, and in all that time I don't think I've ever seen any real effort at all to actually have it work on anything except Windows. (Which to be clear is a position I totally understand: I'm not blaming FF for throwing 99% of the resources at 99% of the market).

It'll be cool if it happens, I suppose? But like I say, a difference of a few %, or slightly better battery life or whatever doesn't mean anything to me anyway.

**arQon** · 17 November 2020, 05:30 PM

Originally posted by uid313 View Post

I recently had some performance problems with Firefox, just changing tabs took a long time, but I solved it by clearing the cache, and going to about

references#privacy and clicking on "Manage Data" and manually deleting some cookies. Some domains such as YouTube had 100+ cookies, and some domains such as YouTube had multi-megabyte cookies like 8,6 MB.

Yeah, I recently had to help someone out with a Google-driven cookie problem, and came across the same thing. Even weirder is that the *YouTube* cookies are being set by things like Gmail.
It seems to be a side-effect of some attempt by G to preserve their tracking against something - privacy tools like containers or uBlock or whatever. Now, they're practically putting an entire DB in the cookies, and I'd guess maybe merging all the data from every G site into the cookies for all of them. Backups, effectively, so that if one ever gets deleted they can restore all the linkages via the cookies of any other G site you use.

I don't think the megacookies themselves are the cause of any problems with FF, though in fairness you REALLY don't expect a cookie to run to multiple MB, so maybe there's some issue with how the FF code handles pathological cases like that.

**treba** · 17 November 2020, 05:31 PM

Originally posted by arQon View Post

oh? My impression of WebRender on Linux is that the FF team's position is more like "if you have exactly this GPU, then maybe", but not much more than that. The HW-exclusion list seems to be almost infinitely large, with no reasoning behind it other than "well, we haven't tested this specific device" rather than simply assessing a device's capabilities, all of which are well-defined and have been exposed for a very long time now.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the situation, since none of my machines seem slow enough anyway for me to care about trying out WebRender, since I don't benchmark browsers and don't care about single-digit performance improvements. But I've lost track of how many YEARS it's been since the "WebRender will make everything sooo much better" hype, and in all that time I don't think I've ever seen any real effort at all to actually have it work on anything except Windows. (Which to be clear is a position I totally understand: I'm not blaming FF for throwing 99% of the resources at 99% of the market).

It'll be cool if it happens, I suppose? But like I say, a difference of a few %, or slightly better battery life or whatever doesn't mean anything to me anyway.

It's quite more than a few percent. The biggest features "unlocked" by Webrender (in combination with EGL, both on Wayland or X11) are zero-copy WebGL[1] and hardware video decoding (so far limited to VAAPI) support. Both can have quite huge impacts. Apart from that there are many cases that benefit from Webrender itself, especially as screens are getting ever bigger. Rendering 4k in software works but is far from efficient.

Also, Webrender is now also used on MacOS and Android[3]

1: https://mastransky.wordpress.com/202...on-on-wayland/
2: https://mastransky.wordpress.com/202...pi-on-wayland/
3: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/WebRender_Where

**dev_null** · 18 November 2020, 02:47 AM

Am I only sad about HTTPS-Only Mode Option ? I cannot see anything bad with http, it specially was created in text in order to be readable an debuggable. Https requires certificates which only ‘good’ companies can issue, CPU power, complicates debugging and code writing. And it’s amazing where it matters like privacy or money but why to enforce it everywhere ??

**kescherPh** · 18 November 2020, 03:47 AM