Re:Firefox 68.0
by tssva on Tuesday July 09, 2019 @11:15AM
(#20392577)
There is a known severe performance issue on MacBooks with retina screens and integrated Intel graphics which this is suppose to be the solution to. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to have driven macOS to be a priority for the rollout.
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MacOS uses an absolutely decrepit version of OpenGL and a special vendor-locked graphics API (Metal) that nobody else uses.
It's not surprising they get low-priority when Apple makes it a pain to do write a crossplatform app that is supported on their platform.
gfx-rs is a project to provide graphics APIs in Rust, supports Metal as a backend, and there is active work to make WebRender/Firefox work with it.
macOS never seems to be a priority at Mozilla, which kind of sucks. Another power management issue is video decoding. Even when I force YouTube to play .mp4 instead of VP9, my battery use is still 2-3x higher on Firefox than Safari, despite H264 acceleration being easily available via VideoToolBox, and VideoToolBox has been available since 2011 (Lion) or 2012 (Mountain Lion).