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

Written by Michael Larabel in Mozilla on 27 November 2017 at 08:29 AM EST. 33 Comments
MOZILLA
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.

WebRender as a reminder is Mozilla's GPU-based renderer used currently within the Servo engine and has also been fitted into Firefox with Gecko. Those unfamiliar with WebRender can learn more about its architecture on their GitHub Wiki and this Mozilla Hacks blog post from last month.

In WebRender's latest newsletter they detail the latest progress. They note WebRender is working well with the Intel Mesa driver while the NVIDIA proprietary driver has been running into issues. In many cases WebRender with Firefox is delivering a nice speed boost.

Recently there have been a number of bug fixes, performance improvements, and also improvements on the Gecko side.

WebRender is currently available in Firefox Nightly and Linux users can test it out if setting gfx.webrender.enabled, gfx.webrender.blob-images, image.mem.shared, and layers.acceleration.force-enabled.

More details in this blog post.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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