moz://gfx newsletter #54

Hey all, Jim Mathies here, the new Mozilla Graphics Team manager. We haven't had a Graphics Newsletter since July, so there's lots to catch up on. TL/DR - We're shipping our Rust based WebRender backend to a very wide audience as of Firefox 84. Read on for more detail on our progress. WebRender Current Status …

moz://gfx newsletter #53

Bonjour à tous et à toutes, this is episode 53 of your favorite and only Firefox graphics newsletter. From now on instead of peeling through commit logs, I will be simply gathering notes sent to me by the rest of the team. This means the newsletter will be shorter, hopefully a bit less overwhelming with …

moz://gfx newsletter #52

Hello everyone! I know you have been missing your favorite and only newsletter about software engineers staying at home, washing their hands often and fixing strange rendering glitches in Firefox's graphics engine. In the last two months there has been a heap of fixes and improvements. Before the usual change list I'll go through a …

moz://gfx newsletter #51

Bonjour, bonjour! Another long overdue episode of your favourite Mozilla gfx team newsletter is here. A few weeks ago, Jessie published a call to help us find steps to reproduce a mysterious glitch. Thanks a ton to everyone who helped out with this one! Glenn landed a fix to an issue that we suspect might …

Challenge: Snitch on the glitch! Help the Graphics team track down an interesting WebRender bug…

For the past little while, we have been tracking some interesting WebRender bugs that people are reporting in release. Despite best efforts, we have been unable to determine clear steps to reproduce these issues and have been unable to find a fix for them. Today we are announcing a special challenge to the community - …

moz://gfx newsletter #50

Hi there! Another gfx newsletter incoming. Glenn and Sotaro's work on integrating WebRender with DirectComposition on Windows is close to being ready. We hope to let it ride the trains for Firefox 75. This will lead to lower GPU usage and energy consumption. Once this is done we plan to follow up with enabling WebRender …

moz://gfx newsletter #49

By way of introduction, I invite you to read Markus' excellent post on this blog about CoreAnimation integration yielding substantial improvements in power usage if you haven't already. Next steps in this OS compositor integration saga include taking advantage CoreAnimation with WebRender's picture caching infrastructure (rendering tiles directly into CoreAnimation surfaces), as well as rendering …

Dramatically reduced power usage in Firefox 70 on macOS with Core Animation

In Firefox 70 we changed how pixels get to the screen on macOS. This allows us to do less work per frame when only small parts of the screen change. As a result, Firefox 70 drastically reduces the power usage during browsing. Power usage, in Watts, as displayed by Intel Power Gadget. Lower numbers are …

moz://gfx newsletter #48

Greetings! This issue of the newsletter is long overdue. Without further ado: What's new in gfx Wayland dmabuf textures Martin Stransky landed the dmabuf texture work which was at the prototype stage at the time of the previous newsletter. This is only used with the GL compositor at the moment which is not enabled by …

moz://gfx newsletter #47

Hi there! Time for another mozilla graphics newsletter. In the comments section of the previous newsletter, Michael asked about the relation between WebRender and WebGL, I'll try give a short answer here. Both WebRender and WebGL need access to the GPU to do their work. At the moment both of them use the OpenGL API, …