WebRender newsletter #4 – Mozilla Gfx Team Blog

We skipped the newsletter for a few weeks (sorry about that!), but we are back. I don’t have a lot to report today, in part because I don’t yet have a good workflow to track the interesting changes (especially in gecko) so I am most likely missing a lot of them, and a lot of us are working on big pieces of the project that are taking time to come together and I am waiting for these to be completed before they make it in the newsletter.

Notable WebRender changes

• Glenn started reorganizing the shader sources to make them compile faster (important for startup time).
• Morris implemented the backface-visibility property.
• Glenn added some optimizations to the clipping code.
• Glenn improved the scheduling/batching of alpha passes to reduce the number of render target switches.
• Sotaro improved error handling.
• Glenn improved the transfer of the primitive data to the GPU by using pixel buffer objects instead of texture uploads.
• Glenn added a web-based debugger UI to WebRender. It can inspect display lists, batches and can control various other debugging options.

Notable Gecko changes

• Kats enabled layers-free mode for async scrolling reftests.
• Kats and Morris enabled rendering tables in WebRender.
• Gankro fixed a bug with invisible text not casting shadows.
• Gankro improved the performance of generating text display items.