Experimental Code Allows Vulkan-Accelerated Gecko/Firefox On Linux

With some out-of-tree code of Firefox Nightly with a modified version of Gecko using GFX-RS, it's possible to use the web-browser powered by the Vulkan API on Linux.

Hungarian developer Attila Dusnoki shared the milestone this week of being able to run Gecko with Vulkan on Linux.

This is part of the effort to run Gecko with GFX-RS. GFX-RS, of course, is the Rust portability initiative with low-level graphics abstractions to map to Vulkan, Metal, Direct3D, etc, depending upon the platform.

With the very experimental Gecko code paired with GFX-RS, this can mean using Vulkan for GPU acceleration of the Firefox code. Besides building the out-of-tree code, the environment variables MOZ_ACCELERATED=1 MOZ_WEBRENDER=1 need also be set.

Before getting too excited, Dusnoki warned, "this is VERY experimental ;)"