There Finally Is Work On Shipping Mozilla's WebRender For Some Linux Environments

While Mozilla has been gradually enabling WebRender out-of-the-box in more Windows configurations with succeeding Firefox releases, up to now there hasn't been much visible effort in getting WebRender enabled out-of-the-box for any Linux configurations. But fortunately that is finally changing.

Linux users have been able to opt-in to this generally faster code path via MOZ_WEBRENDER=1 among other WebRender tunables within Firefox. This is for the GPU-based Rust-written rendering engine available within Firefox currently and also at the heart of their Servo effort. But as more Firefox installations on Windows have been seeing WebRender enabled, Linux users have not.

But in this week's Mozilla graphics newsletter they mention, "Part of the team is now focusing on shipping WebRender on some flavors of Linux as well."

They cite this meta tracker bug around WebRender for Linux that has been looking at enabling WebRender for some Linux configurations, such as when running a GNOME X.Org session at 1080p screen or less and select Intel/AMD graphics configurations.

Various bugs blocking WebRender defaults on Linux have been closed in recent time but they aren't over the finish line yet. At least it looks like in the not too distant future Linux users on some hardware/software configurations might start seeing WebRender used by default for a faster browser rendering experience.

The latest newsletter also mentions they continue work on transitioning from GLX usage to EGL on Linux for better support and increased code sharing between conventional Linux and Android. There also continues to be work on WebRender's software back-end and various performance optimizations in general.