Fastest browser engine by far at 500 FPS! Servo Webrender - CSS on the GPU part 1: Rust
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters point to it when discussing how WebRender works and as evidence of what GPU-based browser rendering can achieve.
What it is
An excerpt from a Bay Area Rust meetup on Servo's WebRender, which renders CSS display lists on the GPU at very high frame rates. It explains the approach and demos rendering at around 500 FPS.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2017 to 2017.
What Hacker News said
Recommends NiLSPACE · 2017-04 · on “Mozilla and Microsoft are rebuilding their browsers’ foundations”
If you have the time there is a nice talk about WebRender: [this video] Here is another great talk: [LINK] At ~25:30 he'll also talk a bit about Quantum. In a nutshell WebRender is used to send a web page to the GPU which will paint all divs, borders, shadows, images etc. Currently WebRender is the only component I'm aware of that is inside Firefox Nightly. It's still behind a config though.
Cites ZenoArrow · 2017-01 · on “Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo”
>"If performance is not competitive" I don't think this will be a problem. One example... [this video] [LINK]
Cites littlestymaar · 2017-09 · on “CSS Triggers”
You should take these advices with a grain of salt because it refers to the legacy rendering pipeline used by current web browers. There is not absolute rule stating that layout and painting must be slow while compositing is not. In fact Mozillians are currently working on a new rendering pipeline[1] based on state of the art rendering tools[2]. This new pipeline should be deployed in firefox in 2018 as a part of the ongoing Quantum project. [1] [LINK] [2] [this video]
Cites yazaddaruvala · 2017-09 · on “Introduction to WebRender”
I'm sure the future blog posts will have more details, but it has to do with immediate mode vs retained mode APIs. [this video]
Cites srcmap · 2017-11 · on “Desktop compositing latency is real”
According to this: [this video] Firefox's servo engine can compose CSS elements/Display List together at 500 frames / second. Maybe next version of Windows / Linux desktop should use FF's servo engine?