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

[89c51]

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

I somehow expect linux to be left behind for some releases.

[andrei_me]

After changing this preferences, how do I check if it is really enable? Check about:support?

[schmidtbag]

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?).

I've used 768kbps DSL on modern browsers (thankfully, I don't have that speed at home) and I haven't had that issue. In my experience, I only got the issue you mentioned when the connection drops or times out. At 8mbps, there is no way you should be getting timed out, so perhaps your connection integrity is the problem. That, or you're downloading too many things in the background*. If you're using Ethernet or wifi with a strong connection, the problem could be on the modem or ISP side.

* Even if you think you aren't downloading anything, if you have any forwarded ports (like for SSH) you might be getting spammed pretty hard by hackers in China. I once built a home server that doubled as a wireless router and I had to change SSH to port 300 to stop the spam.

[schmidtbag]

After changing this preferences, how do I check if it is really enable? Check about:support?

Try a web-based GPU stress test.

[Michael_S]

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.

Interesting. I run Firefox and Chrome with EFF Privacy Badger against the benchmarks on browserbench.org every few months, and Firefox wins big in one, loses by a tiny margin in two, and loses big in one.

[shmerl]

Hopefully with WebRender out, Mozilla developers can revisit GPU accelerated video decoding and Wayland support (which apparently depend on it to a big degree).

I'm also waiting for Vulkan backend support in WebRender which is currently work in progress.

[ThanosApostolou]

• GTK client-side decorations (CSD).

Firefox nightly just got CSD easily selectable from "Customize" menu (it's still a bit ugly with most themes but it will improve):

[PluMGMK]

I've used 768kbps DSL on modern browsers (thankfully, I don't have that speed at home) and I haven't had that issue. In my experience, I only got the issue you mentioned when the connection drops or times out. At 8mbps, there is no way you should be getting timed out, so perhaps your connection integrity is the problem. That, or you're downloading too many things in the background*. If you're using Ethernet or wifi with a strong connection, the problem could be on the modem or ISP side.

* Even if you think you aren't downloading anything, if you have any forwarded ports (like for SSH) you might be getting spammed pretty hard by hackers in China. I once built a home server that doubled as a wireless router and I had to change SSH to port 300 to stop the spam.

Sorry, my posts were a bit disjointed. The integrity problems are on supposedly-3G mobile (or even public Wifi, although I tend not to use that for security reasons). My 8-Meg home connection is solid and none of that nonsense happens with it.

[Zan Lynx]

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?).

This is the fault of the web server sending you the icon. If it was sent using a proper Content-Length or Transfer-Encoding: chunked then your browser would know that it hadn't received all the data and it had an incomplete image file. But if the server sends it without any length information the receiver has no idea how long it is supposed to be and a dropped connection makes it think it has the complete file.

[starshipeleven]

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

Because more lag is caused by javascript and page rendering than by file transfer speeds.

The average website page size is measured in kilobytes, so raw transfer speed is mostly irrelevant beyond the 1 MBit speeds.

Then there are sites that try to load 121323413 different assets from cloud providers (especially ads), and in that case there is lag and waiting because the site must send and wait for answers before sending content to you. This is tangential to both browser speed and the user's own download speed.