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A comment on Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014). Parent comment

Re:Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014) by me551ah on Friday December 07, 2018 @07:59AM (#18627256)
You missed Webrender.

I switched over the firefox a month ago from chrome. While I had tried doing that a few times over the past few years, i came back to chrome because honestly there was not much difference and chrome just feels like home. This time around I had switched to try out a new tech called 'webrender'. Webrender takes a completely different approach to rendering and compositing, instead of maintainting layers and repainting certain sections it renders and paints content like a game engine.

Chrome can get jerky on a 4k monitor with lots of tabs open, but not firefox . With webrender everything is silky smooth. It's so good that I used hacks to also enable it on my intel laptop ( webrender is currently not supported on integrated graphics by default ) and the result is a browser which feels and works smoother than anything that I have experienced before. Everytime I open chrome now it just feels laggy and slow in comparison.

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Re:Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014) by nindalf on Friday December 07, 2018 @08:07AM (#18627317)
Webrender is exactly what I was thinking of when I said

> [Firefox] ... likely will continue to get better.

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Re:Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014) by ddalex on Friday December 07, 2018 @09:04AM (#18627691)
Any pointers on how to do it?
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Re:Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014) by opencl on Friday December 07, 2018 @09:41AM (#18628012)
Currently webrender only works on nightly builds unless you have NVIDIA hardware on Windows 10 (not considered mature enough on other hardware/platforms yet).

But to enable it you turn on gfx.webrender.all in about:config.

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Re:Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014) by apetresc on Friday December 07, 2018 @09:46AM (#18628054)
For NVidia/Win10 users, is it in Stable, or only the beta channel? I have that configuration available but I still don't see the gfx.webrender.all key in about:config.
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Re:Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014) by cpeterso on Friday December 07, 2018 @01:45PM (#18630329)
The "gfx.webrender.all" about:config preference to enable WebRender is only available in Firefox Nightly (not Beta or Release channels). The WebRender code exists in Beta and Release and might be randomly enabled for A/B experiments.
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Re:Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014) by opencl on Friday December 07, 2018 @02:39PM (#18630840)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1432515

Going by this bugzilla thread it seems like it should be in stable. But maybe they changed it back.

Though the hardware requirement is actually NVIDIA desktop hardware on Windows 10, i.e. laptops are currently excluded. Which is implemented by checking if your computer has a battery.

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Re:Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014) by apetresc on Friday December 07, 2018 @02:53PM (#18630974)
Yup, this is an NVidia GTX 1080Ti on a desktop, should've been fine. Based on the other response it looks like the toggle is only on Nightly in Windows too, they're only doing random A/B tests on the other channels. Too bad.
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Re:Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014) by dhimes on Friday December 07, 2018 @01:44PM (#18630309)
A little OT: How do you use nightly? Do you have a cron job that downloads it? Do you download it every day? Do you only occasionally download it? Or is there some other way? I'd love to use it more but last I checked they didn't offer auto-updates to it.
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Re:Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014) by mrguyorama on Friday December 07, 2018 @01:51PM (#18630389)
You download the nightly installer from mozilla's website, and then it bugs you to "Restart to update" everyday. I run nightly on many of my systems, but I don't update every day
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Re:Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014) by dhimes on Friday December 07, 2018 @04:44PM (#18631988)
OK thanks.
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Re:Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014) by MrBuddyCasino on Friday December 07, 2018 @08:08AM (#18627319)
Not yet available on Mac it seems.
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Re:Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014) by pcwalton on Friday December 07, 2018 @10:12AM (#18628268)
It's available on Mac via about:config, on nightly. (All caveats about pre-release software apply.)

I've been using WebRender as my daily driver on Mac for months now.

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Re:Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014) by samat on Friday December 07, 2018 @09:56AM (#18628137)
I wonder if it is possible to subscribe to something to get an update once it's available in any form on Mac?
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Re:Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014) by MrBuddyCasino on Friday December 07, 2018 @09:59AM (#18628168)
There should be a FeatureAlert service that notifies you. People should be able to crowdsource feature requests, and devs would implement the most popular ones.
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