Firefox 94 To Start Using EGL On Linux - Better Performance, Lower Power Use

[Danny3]

I think you missed the point: it's a laptop use case

So ?
I have a laptop with Intel IGPU and AMD dGPU.
Hopefully in the future we see laptops with AMD APUs and GPUs.
I would definitely buy one like that.

[RealNC]

Why is EGL better? I thought OpenGL is the full-featured API, while EGL is a reduced one for devices with limited capabilities. So OpenGL should be better.

[blackshard]

Why is EGL better? I thought OpenGL is the full-featured API, while EGL is a reduced one for devices with limited capabilities. So OpenGL should be better.

EGL is not a graphics API like OpenGL or OpenGL ES. It is a "glue" API to let graphics APIs (OpenGL, GLES, OpenVG, ...) and rendering targets (X11, wayland, gbm, ...) interoperate.

[RealNC]

EGL is not a graphics API like OpenGL or OpenGL ES. It is a "glue" API to let graphics APIs (OpenGL, GLES, OpenVG, ...) and rendering targets (X11, wayland, gbm, ...) interoperate.

So how does that increase performance?

[intelfx]

Why is EGL better? I thought OpenGL is the full-featured API, while EGL is a reduced one for devices with limited capabilities. So OpenGL should be better.

No, that's not how it works at all. You are probably confusing EGL with OpenGL ES.

[mirmirmir]

So ?
I have a laptop with Intel IGPU and AMD dGPU.
Hopefully in the future we see laptops with AMD APUs and GPUs.
I would definitely buy one like that.

Graphic driver on windows lock browser on power saving mode no matter what. They must think it's not worth giving dedicated grapic power for browser.

[curfew]

Why is EGL better? I thought OpenGL is the full-featured API, while EGL is a reduced one for devices with limited capabilities. So OpenGL should be better.

EGL is a hard requirement for hardware acceleration under Wayland. The alternative to it is GLX which uses Xorg APIs and therefore is restricted to Xorg. Therefore this piece of news seems to concern only Firefox on X11 -- the Wayland version has been using EGL since day 1.

Although you are talking about OpenGL ES and not EGL -- or whatever. EGL can use both OpenGL platforms underneath.

[Azrael5]

As soon as Nvidia has introduced GBM innovation to grant fully support to wayland other pieces of software are adjusted to improve. Nvidia has been the lock down for Wayland.

[lorn10]

It should be noted here that newer Firefox versions are running since quite some time really great on X11 thanks to EGL (and Webrender). So defaulting to EGL will be effectively a big win in almost any regard and not only for newer hardware but also for older one. Note, this is true just as well for KDE and not only Gnome.

I can confirm this for several different older Radeon GPUs which uses the r600 driver and (stock Ubuntu) Mesa 21.0.3. Even my oldest Radeon X1600 reacts in conjunction with the r300 driver far more responsive during web browsing. And this is true although only software Webrender is active, EGL alone brings in comparison to the old GLX a noticeable performance advantage.

At the moment, only the new Intel crocus driver seems to have some issues when EGL is forced in Firefox (under KDE). Firefox is getting blank and / or white, - I think this is know as the "Firefox white windows symptom".

[Michael_S]

.put ~/.config and ~/.cache on ssd

Thanks, I'll look into it! My home dir is more than 5 years old, so .cache is 12GB. But I have enough space for it on my SSD.

I would just need to modify my backup process to handle the difference. I can't swap "rsync (other flags) -l", which copies symlinks as symlinks for "rsync (other flags) -L", which copies symlinks as referent files and directories because I have lots of other symlinks I would want copied as symlinks.