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 us are working on big pieces of the project that are taking time to come together and I am waiting for these to be completed before they make it in the newsletter.

Notable WebRender changes

Glenn started reorganizing the shader sources to make them compile faster (important for startup time).

Morris implemented the backface-visibility property.

Glenn added some optimizations to the clipping code.

Glenn improved the scheduling/batching of alpha passes to reduce the number of render target switches.

Sotaro improved error handling.

Glenn improved the transfer of the primitive data to the GPU by using pixel buffer objects instead of texture uploads.

Glenn added a web-based debugger UI to WebRender. It can inspect display lists, batches and can control various other debugging options.

Notable Gecko changes

Kats enabled layers-free mode for async scrolling reftests.

Kats and Morris enabled rendering tables in WebRender.

Gankro fixed a bug with invisible text not casting shadows.

Gankro improved the performance of generating text display items.