
WebRender newsletter - aorth
https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2017/08/16/webrender-newsletter-1/
======
_frog
For those not following Firefox development too closely, there's a few major
projects in the works right now:

\- Stylo, the new CSS styling engine currently enabled for a percentage of
Nightly users

\- WebRender, a new GPU-based rendering engine that's currently in much
earlier stages

\- Quantum, an initiative to improve Firefox's real and perceived performance
(there's a bunch of smaller initiatives that compose this, like Quantum Flow
and Quantum DOM)

\- Photon, a project to redesign and modernise the Firefox UI

Most (but not all) of these projects are aiming to ship with Firefox 57 later
this year, but you can check them out now in Nightly. I've been using it for a
few weeks and the difference is really night and day, huge props to all the
Firefox contributors.

~~~
nnethercote
Strictly speaking, Stylo and WebRender fall under the Quantum project
umbrella, as "Quantum CSS" and "Quantum Render", respectively.
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum) has
details. (The names are definitely confusing!)

Also, Quantum Flow is not so small! It's actually now the part of Quantum
that's getting the highest priority and most resources. It doesn't involved
any single component, but is rather a focused effort to relentlessly profile
Firefox on real-world workloads and eliminate as many noticeable slowdowns
(jank, stutters, pauses, spinning beachballs, etc.) as possible. It's been
hugely effective, with noticeable speed-ups in each release from Firefox 54 to
57. Ehsan Akhgari's blog has more details:
[https://ehsanakhgari.org/blog](https://ehsanakhgari.org/blog)

------
readams
For those that might not know WebRender is the project to merge the Rust-based
parallel GPU-based web rendering backend from the experimental Servo browser
with Firefox. This should ultimately result in greatly improved rendering
speed for Firefox.

~~~
JasonSage
A few nits on your description: WebRender is the library which performs
parallel GPU-based rendering of web content and was initially developed as an
experimental backend for Servo. Quantum is the name of the project which aims
to merge Servo components into Firefox.

~~~
52-6F-62
That's really interesting. I was curious about Servo, but it ultimately ran
terribly for me and so I (in my bustle) deigned it an experiment too early to
spend time assessing -- since I'm not very experience with Rust.

Do you have any good resources here -- if for nothing else but to feed my, and
anybody else's curiosity?

~~~
buster
I was particularly impressed by the short rendering demos in this talk:
[https://youtu.be/UGl9VVIOo3E?t=977](https://youtu.be/UGl9VVIOo3E?t=977)

I really hope Servo will be the next generation browser engine.

~~~
52-6F-62
Thanks!

------
mintplant
For anyone else wondering about the difference between "gfx.webrend
_er_.enabled" and "gfx.webrend _est_.enabled":
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1365418](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1365418)

"gfx.webrend _er_.enabled" enables WebRender and "gfx.webrend _est_.enabled"
toggles on some more advanced features on top of the base level.

~~~
Gankro
even more clearly:

webrender is "the stuff that works pretty ok and we can run through CI". In
principle enabling webrender should get you the ~same results as not having it
on, visually, modulo a few known bugs.

webrendest is "everything we're working on, no matter how broken"

It's a pretty big project so there's lots of stuff in tree that's barely
functional (especially true with the layers-free pivot).

------
eridius
Suggestion: The first paragraph of every newsletter should have a brief one-
or-two-line description of what WebRenderer is.

I clicked on the Quantum Flow and Photon newsletters and those don't describe
what they are at all. I have a general idea of what Quantum Flow is already,
but I have no idea what Photon is.

~~~
the8472
Isn't a newsletter for those who already know about it and what it is and want
to be informed about its progress? Just because it gets linked from HN doesn't
mean it has to act as introductory page.

~~~
plorkyeran
Good newsletters that excite the recipients will inevitably get linked to
people not already familiar with the topic, and by ignoring them you're
passing up on one of the best ways to get new people excited about your thing.
A 1-2 line blurb can be very effective and there's really no reason not to do
it.

------
jayflux
For anyone wandering what WebRender actually is or does

[https://github.com/servo/webrender/wiki](https://github.com/servo/webrender/wiki)

