🎉 WebRender is in beta 🎉! There are still a number of blocking bugs so WebRender will stay on beta for a few trains until it has received enough polish to hit the release population. This is an important milestone for everyone working on the project and the main piece of news outside of the bullet points below.

I’m increasingly running out of ideas to write intros without repeating the same thing each week. So instead I’ll start the next few newsletter with a piece of WebRender history (moved to a separate post now).

Notable WebRender and Gecko changes

Bobby implemented a more efficient sizing logic for render targets to save GPU memory.

Bobby fixed a crash.

Dan prevented enormous box shadows from crashing the renderer.

Kats improved the tooling to synchronize between the WebRender and Gecko repositories.

Kats and Jamie got WebRender in Firefox for Android to a point where it doesn’t just crash at startup.

Kvark fixed the backface visibility bugs.

Kvark fixed z-fighting glitch with 3d transforms.

Matt fixed some tiled blob image bugs.

Andrew landed the first half of the animated image recycling work.

Andrew fixed a crash

Lee fixed a font leak on Windows.

Glenn worked around a clip mask bug with blob images.

Glenn landed a series of incremental changes towards picture caching: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Emilio implemented proper support for using tiled images as clip masks.

Sotaro fixed a texture corruption issue after resuming from sleep on Linux with proprietary nVidia drivers.

Sotaro fixed a flickering issue at startup on Windows.

Ongoing work

Glenn is making progress towards picture caching.

Doug is getting close to completing the document splitting work.

Nical is getting a subset of SVG filters to run on the GPU instead of the CPU fallback.

Bobby never stops improving memory usage.

Matt and Gankro are improving the interaction between blob images and scrolling.

Kats is standing up WebRender in Firefox for Android.

Enabling WebRender in Firefox Nightly

In about:config set “gfx.webrender.all” to true,

restart Firefox.