WebKitGTK 2.46 Uses Skia Rather Than Cairo, More CPU/GPU Optimizations To Come

[phoronix]

Phoronix: WebKitGTK 2.46 Uses Skia Rather Than Cairo, More CPU/GPU Optimizations To Come

Igalia open-source developer Carlos Garcia Campos has written a new blog post to outline recent graphics improvements found in WebKitGTK 2.46 and WPEWebKit 2.46. Most notable with the new stable release is using the Skia library rather than Cairo as the 2D graphics renderer. There are also other graphics improvements and more enhancements to come...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/WebKitGTK-2.46-Skia

[Topolino]

"Initial support for profiling in 2.46 using sysprof"

[Quackdoc]

hopefully stuff like this starts to pay off, webkitgtk is so far behind in performance its actually out right unusable on my laptop.

[ahrs]

hopefully stuff like this starts to pay off, webkitgtk is so far behind in performance its actually out right unusable on my laptop.

If they get the performance on par with other browser engines, and can improve the WebExtension support (GNOME Web can run web extensions like uBlock Origin now but it's still very preliminary, at least when I was last testing it, it was rough) it could be viable to switch to a WebkitGTK powered browser full-time.

[JEBjames]

Michael

Typo

"graphixs rendering" should be "graphics"

[Quackdoc]

If they get the performance on par with other browser engines, and can improve the WebExtension support (GNOME Web can run web extensions like uBlock Origin now but it's still very preliminary, at least when I was last testing it, it was rough) it could be viable to switch to a WebkitGTK powered browser full-time.

I was hoping that angelfish would get extension support but sadly it doesn't seem like it is on the table, it does have good adblock tho since it has ad adblock-rust (brave's engine) for a while

[NateHubbard]

Is webkit-gtk only being used by GNOME Web now, or are there some other browsers out there that I'm just not familiar with?

[mSparks]

hopefully stuff like this starts to pay off, webkitgtk is so far behind in performance its actually out right unusable on my laptop.

afaik, skia doesn't have support for 2d hardware acceleration, so this will be a pretty big performance regression for most use cases.

afaict, its more about getting it to work with wayland (cairo relies on X11 for hardware acceleration, wayland doesnt have hardware acceleration so anyone who cares about performance isn't and wont use it anyway)

[Quackdoc]

afaik, skia doesn't have support for 2d hardware acceleration, so this will be a pretty big performance regression for most use cases.

afaict, its more about getting it to work with wayland (cairo relies on X11 for hardware acceleration, wayland doesnt have hardware acceleration so anyone who cares about performance isn't and wont use it anyway)

skia can do 2d.

[mSparks]

skia can do 2d.

obviously, since the whole point is its a 2D engine, but unlike cairo, skia dev priority has been low end hardware compatibility- not performance.

So skia will be a performance regression, with the hope of broader hardware compatibility and "maybe" fixing the perf later.

e.g.
https://tomicriedel.com/blog/posts/u...ndering-engine