Firefox Nightly can use your GPU to render web browsing

[mongeese]

Forward-looking: Do you notice when your web browser drops frames? Even if you have a powerful CPU you probably find that you don’t quite reach the silky-smooth 60fps mark when scrolling down a website with a moving background. It’s even worse at 4K, not to mention Mozilla’s goals of dual 4K 90fps display integration for their WebVR projects. This is because of the inefficient method current web browsers use to render web pages.

Mozilla’s solution to the problem – called WebRender – has recently been enabled in the Firefox beta variant Firefox Nightly by Mozilla developer Jeff Muizelaar. It’s automatically enabled for Windows 10 desktop devices with an Nvidia GPU and you can enable it in settings on other hardware, though he says it isn’t ready for Android yet.

WebRender is part of Mozilla’s long-term plan to overhaul Firefox to be future ready and has been under testing for many months “without major issues.” Like most Nightly features, full integration into standard Firefox is expected soon. Various Firefox Nightly users have already reported noticeable performance increases, while others are worried that having the browser open in the background could harm game performance.

You can check out the performance uplift in the example video below:

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/76453-firefox-nightly-can-use-gpu-render-web-browsing.html

 

[Vulcanproject]

This would be great, software really should be capable of fully utilising all the resources inside a machine to give the best experience. GPU acceleration has been touted in many applications for a very long time, but it still seems to be overlooked in common applications everyone uses on the average PC.

I feel a culprit for browsing stutter on many machines is often the dynamic clock speeds of modern CPUs. They can be extremely aggressive to try and save power, shedding cycles. It can definitely result in micro stutters in the split second response ramping back up for a higher load.

 

[NahNood]

So does it still crash the nvidia driver periodically?

 

[veLa]

This has the potential to be very impressive.

 

[L Monty]

I like this idea! I hope Chrome does something similar. If not, I may be tempted to switch back to Firefox.

I have a laptop with i5-8250u and MX150 GPU, and would really love to use the MX150 for more than just casual gaming.

Although GPU acceleration is already enabled in my browser (again, this is Chrome and not Firefox), I noticed that loading large images (manga pages) in MangaFox spikes up the CPU load, and not the GPU. This is true even if I force Chrome to use MX150 in the nVidia control panel. I find this weird, and can ony speculate that the GPU acceleration is not fully implemented (I.e. probably only used for video acceleration and 3D elements, not 2D images). A fuller implementation will be most welcome.

 

[psycros]

Firefox has been dead since they betrayed all their addon developers for the second time in three years. If you don't use Chrome already you might as well because there is no difference between the two now.

 

[PurpleYoda]

Funny comment about open browser hurting game performance.. Real gamers don't have ANYTHING open apart from the game ;-P

 

[ET3D]

Funny comment about open browser hurting game performance.. Real gamers don't have ANYTHING open apart from the game ;-P

You're right, consoles don't run browsers. :‑Þ

 

[Danny101]

Nice thought if Mozilla can keep Firefox from crashing.

 

[mrjgriffin]

This has existed in chrome for a long time. go to chrome://flags and type in raster and enable "gpu rasterization and zero copy rasterizer" set raster threads to the max number and put the msaa count to 16. find smooth scrolling as well and disable that lag causing garbage too

 

[baldmosher]

This has existed in chrome for a long time. go to chrome://flags and type in raster and enable "gpu rasterization and zero copy rasterizer" set raster threads to the max number and put the msaa count to 16. find smooth scrolling as well and disable that lag causing garbage too

I just did this, but didn't notice any difference. (Intel 620 on-chip GPU displaying 1080p.) That said, I didn't notice it being particularly juddery previously. Can't imagine it'll do any harm to shift some processing to the GPU, though.

 

[JaredTheDragon]

Firefox has been dead since they betrayed all their addon developers for the second time in three years. If you don't use Chrome already you might as well because there is no difference between the two now.

Except that one is natively and intentionally spyware and the other is... More open. And faster. And better at memory-management, and blah blah blah biased propaganda.

I came to argue that Firefox wasn't actually dead, but then did a bit of updated research for August/Sept 2018 and it turns out it's not even at 10% anymore on desktop. I wouldn't say it's dead, but they lost their edge to the NSA team a long time ago and they probably can't get it back now, unless they actually did something phenomenal.

That said, aside from one or two extensions I liked before "Quantum" came out, it's been a decent experience since.

 

[cliffordcooley]

I wouldn't say it's dead, but they lost their edge to the NSA team a long time ago and they probably can't get it back now, unless they actually did something phenomenal.

They could mimic Google and bundle their software with every piece of freeware offered online. I'm actually surprised Microsoft hasn't tried using Freeware to reactivate Edge on everyone's machine.

 

[L Monty]

This has existed in chrome for a long time. go to chrome://flags and type in raster and enable "gpu rasterization and zero copy rasterizer" set raster threads to the max number and put the msaa count to 16. find smooth scrolling as well and disable that lag causing garbage too

I tried it, but with no difference. When loading scanned manga pages in Mangafox, there is still a noticeable spike in CPU load (well under 1 second, seen in Windows Task Manager) as the page loads.

Thanks just the same for sharing.

 

[havok585]

Firefox has been dead since they betrayed all their addon developers for the second time in three years. If you don't use Chrome already you might as well because there is no difference between the two now.

BS, Firefox dead ? then explain how most people use it? is it because it's actually better ? Chrome has a long way to go until it reaches Firefox.
Most likely your childish reaction is probably because you dont use firefox and hate on it.

 

[Cody Yandura]

I'm not on anyone's side but Edge already does this.

 

[mrjgriffin]

I tried it, but with no difference. When loading scanned manga pages in Mangafox, there is still a noticeable spike in CPU load (well under 1 second, seen in Windows Task Manager) as the page loads.

Thanks just the same for sharing.

I figured chrome was doing something like what the article is mentioning based on what the settings say but as you said I havent noticed any lag with the settings on nor off but I like the offload going to the gpu whenever it can

 

[Kelly Kufeldt]

Firefox has been dead since they betrayed all their addon developers for the second time in three years. If you don't use Chrome already you might as well because there is no difference between the two now.

Actually there is. My bank and my alarm company websites won't open properly in Chrome. I have to use other browsers now, so I just switched back to Firefox until someone fixes the Chrome problem.