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RenderingNG: Ready for the next generation of web content

developer.chrome.com

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Re: RenderingNG: Ready for the next generation of web content

#2
I'm probably just being cynical, but those graphs and diagrams scream of a lack of "meat" to what they're saying. Except for the first graphic, they are all just products of a marketing brain, as far as I can tell.

Showing the old engine as a graph that plummets, and the new one as one that doesnt, or the one that plots "frustration" against "features & complexity", is just utterly meaningless to me. Maybe this appeals to the small part of the community that gets excited for quirky and cool posts by big corps, but I only see about 5 paragraphs of info here.

Basically RenderingNG will more reliable and better and better and more reliable, and thats neat, I just wish they didnt waste so much of the reader's time.

Re: RenderingNG: Ready for the next generation of web content

#3
>Gecko and Webkit have also implemented most of the same architectural features described in these blog posts, and in some cases even added them before Chromium.

That's why all this threaded rendering stuff sounded familiar. Mozilla putting massively-parallel Servo features into Firefox is already a few years old: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software)#Components

Re: RenderingNG: Ready for the next generation of web content

#4
post #2

I'm probably just being cynical, but those graphs and diagrams scream of a lack of "meat" to what they're saying. Except for the first graphic, they are all just products of a marketing brain, as far as I can tell. Showing the old engine as a graph that plummets, and the new one as one that doesnt, or the one that plots "frustration" against "features & complexity", is just utterly meaningless to me. Maybe this appea…

Look at the evolution of the web technologies. Lots of improvements. Now look at the web. It's unusable without an ad blocker. The tech mafia keeps tracking people and censoring the web, practicing right-speak and removing critical voices. Can a new Web technology solve that? If not, it doesnt matter.

Re: RenderingNG: Ready for the next generation of web content

#5
Is this Chrome catching up to Firefox's Quantum projects? I.e. Stylo and WebRender? It puzzles me a bit that Firefox, Chrome, etc. don't reuse each others components. Obviously Chrome can't just plop in WebRender, but is it really more effort to integrate it than to write your own? Same for Firefox and V8. I'm not saying all browsers should be the same, but (and this is a big assumption) if reuse is possible, then wouldn't it make more sense to focus on your team's strengths and use external components for the rest?

Re: RenderingNG: Ready for the next generation of web content

#6
Rendering performance is one of the few things left that Chrome has up its sleeve as an edge over their competitors (mainly Firefox), at least on Linux.

Out of the box, Firefox has terrible rendering performance, not to mention hw-accelerated video decoding. Now, Chrome is not a whole lot better out of the box, since it still applies old "Driver bug workarounds" that have long been fixed in mesa/GPU drivers, but this is easy to circumvent with the `--disable-gpu-driver-bug-workarounds`.

I've been running Chromium with the said flag for over half a decade now, and I have yet to see one of the bugs manifest. Firefox on the other hand, has a similar entry in `about:config`, but one needs to tinker with even more flags to get Firefox to acceptable performance (Somehow, enabling xrender makes WebGL fast, but makes video decoding have weird jitter, etc).

The day Firefox gets comparable WebGL/video decode performance will most likely be the day I switch.

Re: RenderingNG: Ready for the next generation of web content

#7

Rendering performance is one of the few things left that Chrome has up its sleeve as an edge over their competitors (mainly Firefox), at least on Linux. Out of the box, Firefox has terrible rendering performance, not to mention hw-accelerated video decoding. Now, Chrome is not a whole lot better out of the box, since it still applies old "Driver bug workarounds" that have long been fixed in mesa/GPU drivers, but this…

Seriously, FF on Ubuntu causes 100% CPU usage when watching YouTube in 1080p. Meanwhile Chrome on Windows eats maybe 6-10%.

How is this not #1 priority to fix?

Re: RenderingNG: Ready for the next generation of web content

#8
post #5

Is this Chrome catching up to Firefox's Quantum projects? I.e. Stylo and WebRender? It puzzles me a bit that Firefox, Chrome, etc. don't reuse each others components. Obviously Chrome can't just plop in WebRender, but is it really more effort to integrate it than to write your own? Same for Firefox and V8. I'm not saying all browsers should be the same, but (and this is a big assumption) if reuse is possible, then wo…

The article reads more like its a pat on the shoulder for general cleanup work on the Chrome render pipeline that's already been happening since 2014 and that's now nearing the finish line. Also exchange of implementation ideas is more important than exchange of code, especially for implementations of web standards. Microsoft reusing Chromium is already bad enough for the web as a whole (as a counter example, AFAIK the WebGPU implementation teams have been working closely together, but each on their own implementation, which sounds pretty much perfect to me, healthy competition, but without reinventing the wheel).
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