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, …

moz://gfx newsletter #46

Hi there! As previously announced WebRender has made it to the stable channel and a couple of million users are now using it without having opted into it manually. With this important milestone behind us, now is a good time to widen the scope of the newsletter and give credit to other projects being worked …

WebRender newsletter #45

Hi there! I first published this newsletter episode on May 21st and hitting the publish button at the same time as Jessie who wrote an excellent announcement post about WebRender on the stable channel. We decided to unpublish the newsletter for a couple of days to avoid shadowing the other post. WebRender is a GPU …

Graphics Team ships WebRender MVP!

After many months of hard work and preparation, I’m pleased to announce the general availability of WebRender for selected Windows 10 devices. WebRender is a major rewrite of the Firefox rendering architecture using the same kind of GPU-based acceleration techniques used by games. Until now, our browser rendering pipeline varied depending on the platform and …

WebRender newsletter #44

WebRender is a GPU based 2D rendering engine for web written in Rust, currently powering Mozilla's research web browser servo and on its way to becoming Firefox's rendering engine. WebRender on Linux in Firefox Nightly Right after the previous newsletter was published, Andrew and Jeff enabled WebRender for Linux users on Intel integrated GPUs with …