WebRender newsletter #5

Hi there, time for newsletter number five. An important detail went under the radar (and didn't get featured in the newsletter whenever it happened): APZ (async panning and zooming) got enabled by default with WebRender. If you are one of the fearless nightly users who is trying WebRender out, please reset the preference layers.async-pan-zoom.enabled to …

Introduction to WebRender – Part 1 – Browsers today

WebRender, is a 2D renderer for the web. It started as Servo's graphics engine, and we are in the process of integrating it in Firefox. I have been meaning for a while to write about what WebRender is, how it works and how its architecture is different from what Firefox and other browsers currently do. …

WebRender newsletter #4

We skipped the newsletter for a few weeks (sorry about that!), but we are back. I don't have a lot to report today, in part because I don't yet have a good workflow to track the interesting changes (especially in gecko) so I am most likely missing a lot of them, and a lot of …

WebRender newsletter #3

WebRender work is coming along nicely. I haven't managed to properly track what landed this week so the summary below is somewhat short. This does little justice to the great stuff that is happening on the side. For example I won't list the many bugs that Sotaro finds and fixes on a daily basis, or …

WebRender newsletter #2

Here comes the second installment of the WebRender newsletter. Last week's newsletter had some instructions about enabling WebRender but I apparently didn't make it clear enough that the Gecko integration is still in a very rough shape and will be for a while. If Gecko+WebRender spectacularly crashes at startup or renders some things incorrectly on …

WebRender newsletter #1

The Quantum Flow and Photon projects have exciting newsletters. The Quantum graphics project (integrating WebRender in Firefox) hasn't provided a newsletter so far and people have asked for it, so let's give it a try! This newsletter will not capture everything that is happening in the project, only some highlights, and some of the terminology …

Off-main-thread compositing on Linux

We recently enabled off-main-thread compositing on Linux. As I write this post it is enabled on Firefox nightly and Firefox developer edition and if nothing bad comes up it will ride the trains and get enabled in beta and in the stable release of Firefox 40. Web browsers render web content in separate intermediate surfaces …