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0 pointsfloatingatoll7y ago0 comments

The WebRender team seems to be rolling out very gradually and is, if I remember a recent blog post correctly, restricting based on specific GPUs and specific platforms that are proven to work without e.g. crashing or breaking out various things (like window toolbars).

If you set these options, and then later on, you find that your Firefox is super buggy and won't render anything properly and has weird crashes, it could be because you set these options — and it might take hours or days to realize that.

(And then reverse them, somehow, assuming that gfx.webrender.all hasn't broken about:config!)

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4 comments · 2 top-level

chronogram7y ago· 2 in thread

I did definitely notice much better WebRender performance on Nvidia than on Intel, so I turned off WebRender on the Intel laptop.

floatingatollOP7y ago

I went looking at the WebRender blog and they are apparently still making performance improvements every time they post an update, so make sure to clear your override and let the defaults take effect in a few weeks - either it’ll be better or (I assume) the telemetry data will highlight your OS+GPU+driver pairing as needs-improvement (which it can’t with it force-disabled).

chronogram7y ago

Good idea, yes!

floatboth7y ago

Mozilla is very conservative with rollouts, very afraid of user complaints. Of course that is understandable, but I wish they did more cold-turkey YOLO decisions anyway :P At least they should've enabled WebRender for everyone on Nightly and Beta a long time ago.

My daily driver is Firefox Nightly with WebRender + Mesa-git + FreeBSD -CURRENT on a Radeon RX Vega. Haven't seen any GPU related crashes in months, it's very stable actually.

> reverse them, somehow, assuming that gfx.webrender.all hasn't broken about:config

well, safe mode is a thing, but you can also use MOZ_WEBRENDER=1 instead of the about:config prefs.

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