Mozilla's WebRender Making Good Progress, Can Be Tested On Firefox Nightly

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mozilla's WebRender Making Good Progress, Can Be Tested On Firefox Nightly

Mozilla engineers aren't letting up after their Quantum work in Firefox 57 that made the browser much faster. Next they have been improving WebRender and can be tested easily with Firefox Nightly...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=WebRender-On-Firefox-Nightly

[Brisse]

Yesterday, I ran Firefox 57 (with uBlock origin), Chromium (with uBlock origin) and Epiphany through all the benchmarks at http://browserbench.org/

Results kind of surprised me. Firefox was the slowest in every test, sometimes with a big margin. Chromium was in the middle and Epiphany was the fastest, sometimes with a big margin.

Still, Firefox is my go to browser. It's not all about speed. I want to like Epiphany though, but it's lacking some features I consider essential and crashes to often.

[PluMGMK]

Why exactly should us mere mortals with 8-Meg connections care how fast the browser is?

[treba]

Why exactly should us mere mortals with 8-Meg connections care how fast the browser is?

Smooth scrolling, while compiling in the background, on a low end laptop

[schmidtbag]

Why exactly should us mere mortals with 8-Meg connections care how fast the browser is?

I'm pretty sure the performance has more to do with how it runs after the data has been downloaded, not during the download. Pages with a lot of animations, Javascript logic, and/or just complex ways of rendering can be more taxing on your hardware, and these are things you want to care about if you have low-power devices (like phones).

[nomadewolf]

And this is written in Rust, i expect...

[PluMGMK]

Fair enough…
I just sometimes feel that people with slow/unreliable connections get left behind by these shiny new browsers. Like when I visit a website every day and a certain icon gets partially-downloaded, and then somehow the partial version gets cached meaning I need to clear the cache in order to see the proper version again (so why wasn't the proper version cached in the first place?).

[uid313]

I very much look forward to WebRender.

Some things I miss in Firefox though:

• CSS support for the 'system-ui' font-family.
• Support for the <dialog> element.
• Support for the input types 'week' and 'month'.
• GTK client-side decorations (CSD).
• Wayland.

Still, Firefox is my go to browser. It's not all about speed. I want to like Epiphany though, but it's lacking some features I consider essential and crashes to often.

The more addons you install the more potential it gets for it to get slower.

What features do you miss in Epiphany?

A cool thing with Epiphany is that it can be built using Flatpak and that Flatpak can be configured to only allow read access from ~/.cache/Epiphany/ and /.config/Epiphany/ and write access to ~/Downloads/

Why exactly should us mere mortals with 8-Meg connections care how fast the browser is?

I've got a 100 mbit/s connection. My sister got 250 mbit/s. Maybe you live in some backwards country like the United States.

And this is written in Rust, i expect...

Yes, I believe so. Which is rather cool because it eliminates whole sets of bugs and security vulnerabilities while ease the development safe, secure, reliant and fast code. As well as code that parallelizes well while avoid concurrency problems such as deadlocks and race conditions.
I very much look forward to WebRender and believe it will be awesome.

[Brisse]

The more addons you install the more potential it gets for it to get slower.

What features do you miss in Epiphany?

Since Epiphany has built in adblocking I thought it was only fair to compare with Firefox and Chromium with the uBlock origin extension.

Features I miss? Mostly convinient stuff, like url autocompletion, autoscrolling, an easy way to disable the adblocker for sites I like to support etc... Also, I would like for the adblocker to be more competent. It is nowhere near the level of uBlock origin and misses a lot of ads, even ones included in the blacklists. I would like for YouTube to work better, although I'm not sure if that's YouTubes fault or Epiphany. It's buggy with YouTube (sometimes the video playback interface becomes glitchy) and capped to 720p 30fps AVC/AAC, while in Firefox and Chromium I get VP9/Opus with much better quality and framerates. One potential upside is that Epiphany can do hardware decoding, except in my case it doesn't work properly and playback is stuttery unless I remove gstreamer1.0-vaapi to get rid of hardware acceleration.

[tessio]

So we'll finally get GPU rendering by default on Linux?