Chrome vs Firefox vs Safari vs Servo WebRender

What Hacker News said

Cites clouddrover · 2016-04 · on “Vivaldi Browser 1.0”

> The UI is rendered with the browser's rendering engine. Yes, the performance will matter. But as Servo demonstrates there are a lot of speed gains to be made with the right design. See this talk by Patrick Walton about Servo's WebRender: [LINK] And this short demo comparing Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Servo: [this video]

Cites nachtigall · 2016-07 · on “Make the Web Work for Everyone”

See this demo comparing Chrome, Firefox and Servo WebRender: [this video] Servo WebRender uses the GPU making it much faster than classic renderers (besides CPU parallelism), think of it like a Webbrowser using Video Gaming technology. There's a talk about this at [LINK] (HN discussion: [LINK] ) browser.html is just the current "skin" for Servo.

Cites ZenoArrow · 2017-07 · on “60 FPS Animations with CSS3”

> "Which is unlikely to happen anytime soon." Mozilla are moving Servo's WebRender over to Firefox. The feature is called Quantum Render, you can read up about it here: [LINK] To give some idea of what this means for CSS animation performance: [this video]

Cites 482794793792894 · 2017-10 · on “Ask HN: How much is the recent improvement in Firefox Quantum due to Rust?”

The CSS engine was completely rewritten in Rust and now heavily utilizes parallelism, which Rust certainly did help with. I'd say, this was only about 1/4 of the performance increase going from 56 to 57, though. (Based on my perception, having run Nightly as daily driver and being aware of when which bigger change got merged.) The rest of the performance work was untied from Rust, as far as I'm aware. Upcoming somewhen after 57 is also WebRender / Quantum Render, which should give a significant boost to FPS. Basically, if you've ever wondered why your gaming PC can render out giant space warfares at 120 FPS, but your browser starts stuttering when that super cool menu animates itself, WebRen

Cites 482794793792894 · 2017-10 · on “The web at maximum FPS: How WebRender gets rid of jank”

I have it enabled on one of my Firefox profiles. Would not yet recommend for normal browsing, there's still rendering errors and sometimes seemingly random performance drops, but you can definitely see it working. That is, I have to be lucky for this benchmark [1] to not crash my "regular" Firefox Nightly. With WebRender on the other hand, the benchmark becomes entirely unimpressive, as if you were just playing a pre-rendered video. My system has an Intel i5-3220M with HD Graphics 4000 (was midrange for a laptop in 2012) and 4GiB RAM. OS is openSUSE Tumbleweed with a KDE Plasma + bspwm combination as desktop environment, so no desktop compositor (no idea if that makes a difference). [1] [VID

Cites Sylos · 2017-11 · on “Can the new Firefox Quantum regain its web browser market share?”

Well, as it says in the article, Firefox and Chrome on iOS are both just WebKit wrappers, because Apple doesn't allow other browser engines into their store, so I don't know what kind of black magic or bias or whatnot your users are experiencing. As for Android, the new CSS engine (called "Quantum CSS" or "Stylo"), which landed with Firefox 57 on the desktop, should ship on Android with Firefox 59. There's also "Quantum Render" or "WebRender" upcoming somewhen soonish. I'm guessing Firefox 60 or 61 on the desktop, so maybe again with a small delay then on Android, I don't know. WebRender should be kind of a big deal. In extreme cases, the difference can look like this: [this video]

Cites Sylos · 2018-12 · on “Firefox desktop market share now below 9%”

Servo is nowhere near ready. It's been a few months since I've seen actual results, but I'd be surprised, if it nowadays completed ACID3 (which was state of the art for browsers in 2009). The thing is that rewriting a browser engine doesn't just happen over night. No bigger browser engine has been written from scratch since the previous millennium. Also, no browser engine implements all currently specified webstandards. So, Mozilla would have to full-pelt develop Gecko to be able to keep up with Blink in webstandards, and then also develop Servo at more than full-pelt to be able to catch up in finite time. That just doesn't add up, which is why Servo was specifically started as a research pr