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WebRender is in beta

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Re: WebRender is in beta

#71

Post by pcwalton »

MrRadar wrote: post #70
pcwalton wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I think it isn't worth it, as long as we're on X. X11 is not a reasonable protocol, and Xorg is not a reasonable implementation anymore. It's had a good run, but it's time to move on.

Will the situation improve with Wayland? It seems like Firefox is generally moving in the direction of natively supporting Wayland but it doesn't seem like a high priority for now.

I have some working preliminary Wayland integration for WebRender as of this week. However, there's a whole lot more than WebRender integration that needs to get done for Firefox to stand up on Wayland.

Re: WebRender is in beta

#72

Post by beatgammit »

cztomsik wrote: post #36

I've just made very basic integration with node. It's rather PoC, but it works. It can currently show a window and render moving rect from vue.js template. There's still a lot of work to be done, webrender does too little to be just drop in replacement for electron but it might be worth watching if you're interested in anything like that (lightweight cross-platform opengl-rendered gui apps developed in react/vue/angu…

Does it require JavaScript, or can you interact with WebRender from something lower-level, like C++ or Rust?

Re: WebRender is in beta

#73

Post by Natela »

cztomsik wrote: post #68
Natela wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a nice experiment ! There are a few people starting to hack around with WebRender. There are already Limn, Azul, Stylish, etc...it would be nice if we joined forces in developing one good UI framework powered by WebRender.

Thanks for those links, azul is very interesting! This is my first rust project, so I'm not sure if I would be any help I also think it's better to have as much GUI part as possible in typescript, try-and-refine cycle is shorter and imagine how it could be with live/hot-reload What I'm trying to do is something like electron but lighter, faster and memory-savvy. I think it could use azul, so thanks a lot :-)

I agree, I think Typescript is a very good pick for UI developpement, it's easy to use yet you still have types that help with maintainability. I would definitely be using something like this to develop apps :). However there are people who prefer other languages so it'd be nice if we could have a WebRender UI framework on which we could write bindings for any language, similarly to QT and GTK that have bindings for several languages.

Re: WebRender is in beta

#74

Post by MrRadar »

pcwalton wrote: post #71
MrRadar wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will the situation improve with Wayland? It seems like Firefox is generally moving in the direction of natively supporting Wayland but it doesn't seem like a high priority for now.

I have some working preliminary Wayland integration for WebRender as of this week. However, there's a whole lot more than WebRender integration that needs to get done for Firefox to stand up on Wayland.

Thanks for the info. Obviously WebRender and Wayland integration are separate concerns but I was mostly curious if you had any idea if Wayland would address the issues you were running into with X11/Xorg.

Re: WebRender is in beta

#75

Post by pcwalton »

MrRadar wrote: post #74
pcwalton wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some working preliminary Wayland integration for WebRender as of this week. However, there's a whole lot more than WebRender integration that needs to get done for Firefox to stand up on Wayland.

Thanks for the info. Obviously WebRender and Wayland integration are separate concerns but I was mostly curious if you had any idea if Wayland would address the issues you were running into with X11/Xorg.

Yes, Wayland is looking a lot better. The most important feature is transaction support, which is weird in Wayland but better than X, which has none at all.

Re: WebRender is in beta

#76

Post by stcredzero »

pcwalton wrote: post #47
stcredzero wrote: post #44

Is GPU rendering going to open up new security holes? If not, then how do we know it won't?

Can you be more specific as to which "security holes" you're thinking of? You're kind of asking to prove a negative.

Not at all. I'm asking what the current approach and what the current thinking is about this topic.

Re: WebRender is in beta

#77

Post by chmln »

Manishearth wrote: post #60
chmln wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad to hear work this is something that's being worked on because Firefox is still losing market share. And that's not good news for all of us. You may put GPU support in quotation marks, but Chromium is way snappier and faster than Firefox nightlies on my Linux box, and I suspect taking advantage of the GPU is a part of the equation. I also suspect the whole pipeline is more optimized on Chrome. Firefox has ~3x the…

You're literally talking to one of the main initial people behind the Mozilla project that uses the GPU for browser rendering more than any other browser, on the comments of a post about this stuff making its way to a release. Webrender has a pretty large team working on it at this point. You have no idea what you're talking about here.

> You're literally talking to one of the main initial people behind the Mozilla project that uses the GPU for browser rendering more than any other browser, on the comments of a post about this stuff making its way to a release

I don't see how this vague appeal to authority adds anything to the conversation.

> Webrender has a pretty large team working on it at this point.

I guess what you're trying to say is that Firefox and Webrender in particular is a high priority for Mozilla. I would like to believe that this is true, but take a look at what Mozilla allocates its resources to[1] - Firefox Reality, Firefox Monitor, Pocket, ethics in CS, women who tech, etc. All fine and dandy, but the problem is that time is ticking for Mozilla Firefox.

Firefox is not even at feature parity with Chrome, never mind performance parity. For instance, I filed a bug[2] on bad input latency a whole year and 7 releases ago, and its still not fixed. A devtools bug for a websocket frames inspector[3] was filed 5 years ago, and its still not fixed either.

The time it takes to fix bugs and ship all these features is inversely proportional to the dedicated manpower. By the time Firefox reaches feature/performance parity with Chrome, it will have an insignificant single-digit market share, down from ~10.5% now. And that is with the incorrect assumption that Chrome will remain static.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1408699

[3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=885508

Re: WebRender is in beta

#78

Post by danShumway »

tamasnet wrote: post #24

For anyone (like me) not familar with WebRender, here's a great writeup: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/the-whole-web-at-maximum-f... Also a great read for anyone interested in long-form technical articles that try to serve a wide range of reader types.

The moment you said put "great writeup" and "hacks.mozilla.org" in the same sentence, I had a feeling it would be Lin Clark. Highly recommend her articles, I've learned a ton about Firefox's internals from her.
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