Here comes the second installment of the WebRender newsletter. Last week’s newsletter had some instructions about enabling WebRender but I apparently didn’t make it clear enough that the Gecko integration is still in a very rough shape and will be for a while. If Gecko+WebRender spectacularly crashes at startup or renders some things incorrectly on your computer, worry not, it is to be expected. We’ll fix these issues in due time and we will let you know through this newsletter when WebRender gets to a dogfoodable state, and later when it is ready for use by a wider audience.

Notable WebRender changes

This week saw mostly bug fixes in the WebRender repo.

Notable Gecko changes

The texture cache rewrite has landed in gecko.

All text (including shadows and decorations) are handled by WebRender now. This is probably the most noticeable performance improvement of the week. Our current blob image path for fonts is very slow (That will be fixed by bug 1380014).

APZ works in layers-free now.

Removed a bunch of malloc/free from blob image playback. This will speed up blob image playback especially when there are multiple blob images to be played back because we don’t end up running into the malloc/free lock.

Support for perspective transforms.