Firefox 46.0 Is Ready To Ship, GTK3 Support Appears Finally Baked

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Firefox 46.0 Is Ready To Ship, GTK3 Support Appears Finally Baked

Firefox 46 won't be formally announced until the morning, but in usual fashion the source and various platform binaries have appeared this evening. Firefox 46 is another significant update from the folks at Mozilla...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mozilla-Firefox-46.0

[Anvil]

NOTE : APZ Has been Disabled in Firefox 46 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bu...id=1257181#c12

[Penguin36]

Per this webpage: Watch DRM content on Firefox

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-drm

"Beginning in version 48, Firefox desktop also supports the Google Widevine CDM."

Per this webpage: Mozilla To Test Widevine CDM in Firefox Nightly

https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/04/08/mozilla-to-test-widevine-cdm-in-firefox-nightly/

"Last year, we launched with Adobe’s Primetime CDM and now we will soon be testing Firefox support for Google’s Widevine CDM on Windows and Mac OS X."

Does anyone know what Firefox version is targeted to implement Widevine on Linux also?

[nranger]

Arch has had gtk3 enabled on their Firefox builds for a few releases now. The only bug that I've had issues with is where the global dark theme setting in Gnome causes some web page text boxes to have white text on white background or black text on black background. Fortunately someone on the Fedora side posted a bit of custom CSS that worked around that issue. http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=304493

[shmerl]

You cat get EME (i.e. DRM) free version here: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/...6_64-EME-free/

Also, since it's already using GTK3, you can enable Skia and proper GPU acceleration which were disabled before, because of multiple problems that plagued GTK2 backend.

Set these keys in about:config

layers.acceleration.force-enabled = true
gfx.canvas.azure.backends = skia
gfx.content.azure.backends = skia
gfx.canvas.azure.accelerated = true

Now observe in about:support something like:

GPU Accelerated Windows: 2/2 OpenGL (OMTC)
AzureCanvasBackend: skia
AzureContentBackend: skia
AzureSkiaAccelerated: 1

You can test performance difference here: http://js1k.com/2013-spring/demo/1555

See also https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=740200

[liam]

NOTE : APZ Has been Disabled in Firefox 46 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bu...id=1257181#c12

What's interesting, if you look at the regression report, is that Linux regards regresses slightly on, iirc, five tests, moderately on two, and improves greatly on one (called tscrollx).

https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perf.html#/alerts?id=566

Iow, you might want to turn it on.

[liam]

You cat get EME (i.e. DRM) free version here: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/...6_64-EME-free/

Also, since it's already using GTK3, you can enable Skia and proper GPU acceleration which were disabled before, because of multiple problems that plagued GTK2 backend.

Set these keys in about:config

layers.acceleration.force-enabled = true
gfx.canvas.azure.backends = skia
gfx.content.azure.backends = skia
gfx.canvas.azure.accelerated = true

Now observe in about:support something like:

GPU Accelerated Windows: 2/2 OpenGL (OMTC)
AzureCanvasBackend: skia
AzureContentBackend: skia
AzureSkiaAccelerated: 1

You can test performance difference here: http://js1k.com/2013-spring/demo/1555

See also https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=740200

Nvidia drivers?

[shmerl]

Nvidia drivers?

Yes. I didn't test it with Mesa.

[liam]

Yes. I didn't test it with Mesa.

Thanks for the response.


Edit: BTW, I've tried skia, on and off, over the last year or so, and, ignoring rendering glitches, I didn't see any general improvements (some benchmarks improved a good deal, others regressed) but I did notice that CPU usage went up.

[jukkan]

This automatically means Wayland support, right?