Microsoft proves the critics right: We’re heading toward a Chrome-only Web

Re:Microsoft proves the critics right: We’re heading toward ... by _bxg1 on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @05:40PM (#19373337)

You know, I wonder if it's GPU-bound. Macs often have weaker GPUs than Windows machines, and this could explain the inconsistent results people are mentioning in the thread.

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Re:Microsoft proves the critics right: We’re heading toward ... by pcwalton on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @07:52PM (#19374267)

You may be hitting this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522

Firefox does not use Core Animation, unlike Chrome and Safari, which causes an extra full-window blit on GPU in some cases. It also uses a transparent window, so macOS has to composite the content behind the window whenever Firefox draws. I have a patch in there to improve things, as well as a crate planeshift to help the situation with WebRender, but the patch causes some usability regressions so it has not landed. In the meantime you can set gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true in about:config to get an opaque window at the cost of rounded window corners and vibrancy.

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Re:Microsoft proves the critics right: We’re heading toward ... by ben-schaaf on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @06:01PM (#19373512)

I highly doubt this is the case. I can't tell the difference between my gaming desktop and my laptop with integrated graphics.

From what I've seen on the chromium bug tracker, Google has been on a ~5 year crusade to improve Mac performance. Around half the issues Ive seen include something like "We don't know what Mac does here, let's ask some people at the next conference" (these were core rendering performance bugs). I totally get why Firefox can't compete with that. It's fast on the platforms that don't seem to be hell-bent on making custom rendering slow.

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Re:Microsoft proves the critics right: We’re heading toward ... by _bxg1 on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @05:48PM (#19373400)

Ah-hah!

"What if we stopped trying to guess what layers we need? What if we removed this boundary between painting and compositing and just went back to painting every pixel on every frame?

This may sound like a ridiculous idea, but it actually has some precedent. Modern day video games repaint every pixel, and they maintain 60 frames per second more reliably than browsers do. And they do it in an unexpected way… instead of creating these invalidation rectangles and layers to minimize what they need to paint, they just repaint the whole screen.

Wouldn’t rendering a web page like that be way slower?

If we paint on the CPU, it would be. But GPUs are designed to make this work."

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/the-whole-web-at-maximum-f...

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Re:Microsoft proves the critics right: We’re heading toward ... by Quekid5 on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @07:16PM (#19374065)

Are you being sarcastic? I can't tell.

Any modern CPU and GPU can do a lot of DMA and copying of memory in a very short amount of time, but that doesn't mean it'll be efficient wrt. power... which is what I think you were 'complaining' about?

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Re:Microsoft proves the critics right: We’re heading toward ... by miohtama on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @07:12PM (#19374042)

The GPUs can do it, push 60 page updates per second, but that is very energy inefficient way to do it.

You can feel this by playing any 3D shooter on your laptop and see the battery being sucked empty.

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Re:Microsoft proves the critics right: We’re heading toward ... by csomar on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @05:54PM (#19373449)

Nope. I'm on a Mac with a powerful GPU and Firefox still sucks.

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