Greetings! WebRender’s best and only newsletter is here. The number of blocker bugs is rapidly decreasing, thanks to the efforts of everyone involved (staff and volunteers alike). The project is in a good enough shape that some people are now moving on to other projects and we are starting to experiment with webrender on new hardware. WebRender is now enabled by default in Nightly for some subset of AMD GPUs on Windows and we are looking into Intel integrated GPUs as well. As usual we start with small subsets with the goal of gradually expanding in order to avoid running into an overwhelming amount of platform/configuration specific bugs at once.

Notable WebRender and Gecko changes

Bobby improved the test infrastructure for picture caching.

Jeff added restrictions to filter inputs.

Jeff enabled WebRender for a subset of AMD GPUs on Windows.

Matt fixed a filter clipping issue.

Matt made a few improvements to blob image performance.

Emilio fixed perspective scrolling.

Lee worked around transform animation detection disabling sub-pixel AA on some sites.

Lee fixed fixed the dwrote font descriptor handling so we don’t crash anymore on missing fonts.

Lee, Jeff and Andrew fixed how we handle snapping with the will-change property and animated transforms.

Glenn improved the accuracy of sub-pixel box shadows.

Glenn fixed double inflation of text shadows.

Glenn added GPU timers for scale operations.

Glenn optimized drawing axis-aligned clip rectangles into clip masks.

Glenn used down-scaling more often to avoid large blur radii.

Glenn and Nical fixed uneven rendering of transformed shadows with fractional offsets.

Nical rewrote the tile decomposition logic to support negative tile offsets and arbitrary tiling origins.

Nical surveyed the available GPU debugging tools and documented the workarounds.

Sotaro fixed a bug with the lifetime of animations.

Sotaro skipped a test which is specific to how non-webrender backends work.

Sotaro fixed another test that was specific to the non-webrender rendering logic.

Sotaro fixed a bug in the iteration over image bridges when dispatching compositing notifications.

Doug made APZ document-splitting-aware.

Kvark fixed a perspective interpolation issue.

Ongoing work

The team keeps going through the remaining blockers (3 P2 bugs and 11 P3 bugs at the time of writing).

Enabling WebRender in Firefox Nightly

In about:config, set the pref “gfx.webrender.all” to true and restart the browser.

Reporting bugs

The best place to report bugs related to WebRender in Firefox is the Graphics :: WebRender component in bugzilla.

Note that it is possible to log in with a github account.