Mozilla's Servo Still Striving For WebGL Support

[Holograph]

My issues with YouTube on Firefox were caused by the site preferring to stream VP9 instead of H.264, which has hardware acceleration. Using this extension fixed the high CPU usage I was seeing.

That does nothing noticeable whatsoever on my end. Compared the two several times on a handful of videos and the CPU usage was similarly high whether I had H264ify enabled or not. Very odd how there are not just performance issues but also inconsistencies between users, even with stuff like extensions.

[Guest]

My issues with YouTube on Firefox were caused by the site preferring to stream VP9 instead of H.264, which has hardware acceleration. Using this extension fixed the high CPU usage I was seeing.

Default libvpx used for V9 with firefox also has multithreading suppport so unless you only have a single core and thread then I don't quite get the "uses entire single core" thing in your comment. Back to my original question, do you have NVIDIA card? Also note the bug that I linked doesn't necessarily require that video is playing.

[GrayShade]

Default libvpx used for V9 with firefox also has multithreading suppport so unless you only have a single core and thread then I don't quite get the "uses entire single core" thing in your comment. Back to my original question, do you have NVIDIA card? Also note the bug that I linked doesn't necessarily require that video is playing.

No, just the integrated graphics of an old Ivy Bridge i3.

[GrayShade]

That does nothing noticeable whatsoever on my end. Compared the two several times on a handful of videos and the CPU usage was similarly high whether I had H264ify enabled or not. Very odd how there are not just performance issues but also inconsistencies between users, even with stuff like extensions.

There might be many factors at play: my slow CPU, the old integrated graphics, GNOME, maybe Walyand (although I'm not sure I was using that when I installed the extension). Skype is using 15-30% just for having its window open. Maybe VP9 decoding was the slowest part on my machine.

[Termy]

Do you guys have e10s enabled?
I must say that since e10s, FF is by far the most performant browser when handling many tabs (currently around 100) - i never noticed any issues and the ram-usage is fairly moderate with a combined 1.2gb - chrome will use that with 10% of the tabs xD
Before e10s i sometimes was tempted to switch to something else because the performance was really bad sometimes, but since i force-enabled it i have nothing to complain about

[GrayShade]

Do you guys have e10s enabled?
I must say that since e10s, FF is by far the most performant browser when handling many tabs (currently around 100) - i never noticed any issues and the ram-usage is fairly moderate with a combined 1.2gb - chrome will use that with 10% of the tabs xD
Before e10s i sometimes was tempted to switch to something else because the performance was really bad sometimes, but since i force-enabled it i have nothing to complain about

Yeah, I do. Actually, I'm rather pleased with the performance of Firefox, especially as I keep hearing others complain about Chrome and its memory usage or whatever. But yes, I've seen it slowing down on sites like Gmail, especially after leaving it running for a couple of days.

[mulenmar]

Cool, new feature work. Meanwhile, Firefox continues to be extremely poorly threaded and uses tons of CPU even with few tabs open and not much going on and uses over an entire core of an i5 4570S to play a Youtube video.

Maybe they'll actually improve using the browser someday.

Servo is the replacement engine for Firefox, written in Rust. As components are written and mature, they're being plugged into Firefox.

One of Rust's biggest benefits is easy, compile-type checked, SAFE concurrent/threading programming without runtime overhead.

Writing browser components in Rust makes it much easier to create multithread-safe code with the same or better runtime performance as the C/C++ code it replaces, with the added benefit of eliminating entire classes of exploitable security bugs in the parsers of untrusted data (say, a random webpage).

Therefore, you should be delighted that Servo's getting more support for web standards, as that support will be incorporated into Firefox itself. Aside from security fixes, there's no gain for improving components that're being replaced anyway.

Upset about your browser getting slow? Blame web developers who make EVERYTHING client-side Javascript, pulling in from a dozen other sites they have no control over, and thinking that displaying a blank page is "graceful fallback". Not to mention the Code<insert city here> 'graduates' who think the web is a client-side application platform instead of a data delivery service, and who don't want to learn how to do native, performant code.

[Guest]

e10s is currently unavailable to me cuz I can't quite use the web browser without pentadactyl addon (it allows to disable all the UI elements and use vim-style keyboard only control).

[Holograph]

Do you guys have e10s enabled?
I must say that since e10s, FF is by far the most performant browser when handling many tabs (currently around 100) - i never noticed any issues and the ram-usage is fairly moderate with a combined 1.2gb - chrome will use that with 10% of the tabs xD
Before e10s i sometimes was tempted to switch to something else because the performance was really bad sometimes, but since i force-enabled it i have nothing to complain about

I had to Google that and it seems I didn't. I'll give it a try (initial CPU usage upon loading the browser does seem lower). Doubt I'll reach any conclusion on that while this thread is still current but thanks for the suggestion either way.

Firefox previously was hellish enough with only 10 tabs for me... I mean it's not that I could not do 10, 20, 30... but performance was quite bad even with very little going on in the browser. And, again, this is still true if none of my tabs are playing multimedia content like video or audio, though doing that makes it even worse.

As for RAM usage, that's the one thing I don't mind, and if anything I'd even say I don't understand the complaint very much. I have 16GB of RAM which was under $100 even back when I built this machine (it's an Intel Haswell w/ DDR3) and I don't have RAM usage issues with pretty much any browser, even if some of them do use more RAM than they used to.

That said if a browser is going to use a lot of RAM, I would expect it to use it effectively such that more RAM usage enables lower CPU usage (by caching more stuff or something). High CPU AND high RAM is highly annoying.

[Termy]

e10s is currently unavailable to me cuz I can't quite use the web browser without pentadactyl addon (it allows to disable all the UI elements and use vim-style keyboard only control).

have you tried it yet? some of my addons are not officially compatible but i've not encountered any issues with force-enabled e10s - worth giving it a try imho

As for RAM usage, that's the one thing I don't mind, and if anything I'd even say I don't understand the complaint very much. I have 16GB of RAM which was under $100 even back when I built this machine (it's an Intel Haswell w/ DDR3) and I don't have RAM usage issues with pretty much any browser, even if some of them do use more RAM than they used to.

That said if a browser is going to use a lot of RAM, I would expect it to use it effectively such that more RAM usage enables lower CPU usage (by caching more stuff or something). High CPU AND high RAM is highly annoying.

I'm not obsessed with ram-usage either and if browsing is the only thing i do, i wouldn't mind either - but when ram is maxed out by something else, it is nice when the browser and other programs don't feast on ram like there is no tomorrow (looking at you, chrome )