In Firefox it's like a particularly unpleasant salvia trip.

Win10, FF 66, I get what seems close enough to 60fps, but some graphics glitches too, mostly the texture around the barrels which doesn't go all the way "around".

Funnily, this runs with 20-30 FPS on a (lower end) Windows Phone with Edge mobile. Is Edge optimized for CSS performance?

Edge has always been extremely fast and competitive with other browser engines. It really shocked me when they deprecated it because in the last year of developing an app that only targets chrome and edge, I've never once had a bug that was edge-only. It seems that MS was never able to get out of the shadow of IE.

Casual users are now trained to use Chrome. Because they browse on mobile more than on desktop, and Chrome is "The Internet" icon on their phones.

Techies and power users were never going to give Edge a second glance, because they launched without plugin support (i.e. no way to block ads).

The problem with Edge is that they wrapped the engine, which was great, inside a UWP app, which are known to be stupidly ugly and stupidly sluggish. That's what killed it. Had they chosen Win32, it wouldn't have died. But I guess we will never know.

Funnily, it's playable on safari/ipad mini 1st generation.

It is a bit choppy for me in FF 65, running on a 7 year old PC under windows 7, with a very old and low end GPU. Not sure why you see 1 fps.

The choppiness decreases tremendously if I wiggle the mouse around during the demo (clicked on the auto-running third link).

Shouldn't Firefox be prioritizing fixing those things instead of BS moonshot projects they do (not talking about Rust, but various non-browser pivots).

They might be "different teams" doing each, but they all have finite resources to pay them.

WebRender currently (as of the last 2 weeks) renders this correctly, but slowly. Now that correctness is in, they can start looking at speed. Associated bug is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1525420 , but it’s not a blocker for launching WebRender in the first place.

And no, this sort of thing isn’t particularly high priority. If lots of websites used these technologies to this extent then it’d be higher up the priority list I’m sure.

That's the new Rust based render engine?

Sorry, yes, it’s the Rust GPU rendering (not layout) engine that’s being introduced into release Firefox at the moment. Lin Clark wrote a great article on it 18 months ago: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/the-whole-web-at-maximum-f... . It should eventually be considerably faster than it is at the moment, but obviously there’s been a bunch of performance work in the previous Firefox rendering engine so currently it’s a clean codebase that’s moderately faster.

Thanks!

That's nice -- does that replace all rendering parts with the new Rust (servo?) equivalents?

Or are some parts still in the C++ codebase? (rendering related, not the UI code/JS engine, etc).

The diagram on the link seems to imply this is the last part! Does that mean there's some drawing library (akin to Skia) written in Rust used by WebRender too?

There is one project I know of that is bringing webrender to desktop apps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18312983

I’m just an interested observer so handful of salt, but I believe WebRender replaces Moz2D and the old drawing libraries (which included Skia). Honestly, at this point I’m going to defer to pcwalton or whoever’s on HN that’s closer to the project than me.

Works perfectly on safari (webkit) browsers for me.

On Firefox mobile I had no problem

On iOS, all browsers (including firefox) use the OS’s Webview (webkit) as mandated by apple. So basically every browser are Safari reskins.