[HN Gopher] RenderingNG: Ready for the next generation of web co...
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       RenderingNG: Ready for the next generation of web content
        
       Author : chrishtr
       Score  : 53 points
       Date   : 2021-06-30 15:39 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (developer.chrome.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (developer.chrome.com)
        
       | lionkor wrote:
       | I'm probably just being cynical, but those graphs and diagrams
       | scream of a lack of "meat" to what they're saying. Except for the
       | first graphic, they are all just products of a marketing brain,
       | as far as I can tell.
       | 
       | Showing the old engine as a graph that plummets, and the new one
       | as one that doesnt, or the one that plots "frustration" against
       | "features & complexity", is just utterly meaningless to me. Maybe
       | this appeals to the small part of the community that gets excited
       | for quirky and cool posts by big corps, but I only see about 5
       | paragraphs of info here.
       | 
       | Basically RenderingNG will more reliable and better and better
       | and more reliable, and thats neat, I just wish they didnt waste
       | so much of the reader's time.
        
         | peakaboo wrote:
         | Look at the evolution of the web technologies. Lots of
         | improvements. Now look at the web. It's unusable without an ad
         | blocker. The tech mafia keeps tracking people and censoring the
         | web, practicing right-speak and removing critical voices. Can a
         | new Web technology solve that? If not, it doesnt matter.
        
           | rchaud wrote:
           | You're conflating web technology with the content strategy of
           | web publications and Google's moderation approach. These are
           | 3 entirely separate issues.
        
           | azangru wrote:
           | I find this sentiment baffling.
           | 
           | > Now look at the web. It's unusable without an ad blocker.
           | 
           | Don't like ads? Don't visit sites that run ads. For instance,
           | I can't read most of online newspapers because of the ads; so
           | I just don't bother. I visit HN instead.
           | 
           | > The tech mafia keeps tracking people and censoring the web,
           | practicing right-speak and removing critical voices.
           | 
           | I don't know what right-speak is (is it speaking correctly or
           | speaking on right-wing political topics?), but:
           | 
           | - peer-to-peer technologies exist (Odysee, Bitchute, etc.;
           | still relying on the browser to work)
           | 
           | - less censorious networks exist (e.g. locals)
           | 
           | - you can self-host your own platform where you set the rules
           | (phpBB, mattermost, etc.)
           | 
           | - you can run your own blog ang right-speak there to your
           | heart's content; and maybe if this right-speech in
           | interesting, you can attract commenters to exchange ideas (if
           | you find this valuable)
        
             | jfengel wrote:
             | I think "right-speak" is his neologism for "politically
             | correct". What he wants is to practice "wrong-speak", i.e.
             | speech not approved by whatever shadowy forces are
             | constraining him.
        
             | Santosh83 wrote:
             | > Don't like ads? Don't visit sites that run ads.
             | 
             | Lots of people, especially in the developing world, don't
             | have that luxury, and they're also incidentally those with
             | underpowered devices and less tech savvy to go get an ad
             | blocker.
        
               | azangru wrote:
               | I thought we were talking about our own individual
               | choices. At least we can do something about them.
               | 
               | As the problem is described, I don't see any way how it
               | can be approached.
               | 
               | - Don't want ads and tracking -- Well, they exist and
               | aren't going anywhere.
               | 
               | - Don't use sites that show ads -- Nah, can't, don't have
               | this luxury.
               | 
               | - Install ad blocker -- Nah, don't know how or don't have
               | a powerful enough device.
               | 
               | What else is there to do? Keep seeing ads, I suppose.
               | Learn to endure them somehow.
        
         | contravariant wrote:
         | Clearly in the old version the scrolling performance becomes
         | negative at some point, which would be interesting to see.
        
         | egnehots wrote:
         | Yeah, but don't forget that's just the first post in a serie.
         | 
         | Let's hope that the next post will have more meaningful
         | technical content..
        
         | roca wrote:
         | I think the Chrome team has done a lot of good work here, but
         | you're right about the graphs. What units does the
         | "frustration" axis use, anyway?
        
           | ww520 wrote:
           | Hair count? The number of hairs pulled dots to frustration.
        
           | krylon wrote:
           | Decibel, as in the volume at which users yell at their
           | display. ;-)
        
       | meibo wrote:
       | > You should not need to worry about browser bugs making features
       | unreliable, or breaking your site's rendering.
       | 
       | As long as Safari is still around to haunt us, I think I will :)
        
       | emersion wrote:
       | A little disappointed to not see Linux mentioned in any of the
       | timelines.
        
         | d_tr wrote:
         | Indeed. Chromium feels very fast on Windows with a Ryzen 2600
         | and an R9 280X GPU (4 TFLOPS). On Linux it feels sluggish and a
         | single zoom step can take up to a full second on some pages,
         | and nothing I tried (Wayland vs X11, amdgpu vs radeon,
         | experimental chromium flags vs defaults) seems to make any
         | difference...
        
       | readflaggedcomm wrote:
       | >Gecko and Webkit have also implemented most of the same
       | architectural features described in these blog posts, and in some
       | cases even added them before Chromium.
       | 
       | That's why all this threaded rendering stuff sounded familiar.
       | Mozilla putting massively-parallel Servo features into Firefox is
       | already a few years old:
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software)#Components
        
         | pverghese wrote:
         | Yet for some reason. Firefox is still slow compared to chrome
        
       | stolenmerch wrote:
       | Am I correct in reading that these NG sites aren't accessible
       | without a side DOM synced to canvas content?
        
       | tormeh wrote:
       | Is this Chrome catching up to Firefox's Quantum projects? I.e.
       | Stylo and WebRender? It puzzles me a bit that Firefox, Chrome,
       | etc. don't reuse each others components. Obviously Chrome can't
       | just plop in WebRender, but is it really more effort to integrate
       | it than to write your own? Same for Firefox and V8. I'm not
       | saying all browsers should be the same, but (and this is a big
       | assumption) if reuse is possible, then wouldn't it make more
       | sense to focus on your team's strengths and use external
       | components for the rest?
        
         | roca wrote:
         | Using external components is pretty hard. The interfaces
         | between them are pretty complicated and abstraction layers are
         | expensive. There are also different policies in different
         | browsers, e.g. Firefox is much more into using Rust than Chrome
         | is, for obvious reasons.
         | 
         | Firefox does use Skia though.
        
         | flohofwoe wrote:
         | The article reads more like its a pat on the shoulder for
         | general cleanup work on the Chrome render pipeline that's
         | already been happening since 2014 and that's now nearing the
         | finish line. Also exchange of implementation ideas is more
         | important than exchange of code, especially for implementations
         | of web standards. Microsoft reusing Chromium is already bad
         | enough for the web as a whole (as a counter example, AFAIK the
         | WebGPU implementation teams have been working closely together,
         | but each on their own implementation, which sounds pretty much
         | perfect to me, healthy competition, but without reinventing the
         | wheel).
        
       | Ristovski wrote:
       | Rendering performance is one of the few things left that Chrome
       | has up its sleeve as an edge over their competitors (mainly
       | Firefox), at least on Linux.
       | 
       | Out of the box, Firefox has terrible rendering performance, not
       | to mention hw-accelerated video decoding. Now, Chrome is not a
       | whole lot better out of the box, since it still applies old
       | "Driver bug workarounds" that have long been fixed in mesa/GPU
       | drivers, but this is easy to circumvent with the `--disable-gpu-
       | driver-bug-workarounds`.
       | 
       | I've been running Chromium with the said flag for over half a
       | decade now, and I have yet to see one of the bugs manifest.
       | Firefox on the other hand, has a similar entry in `about:config`,
       | but one needs to tinker with even more flags to get Firefox to
       | acceptable performance (Somehow, enabling xrender makes WebGL
       | fast, but makes video decoding have weird jitter, etc).
       | 
       | The day Firefox gets comparable WebGL/video decode performance
       | will most likely be the day I switch.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | floatboth wrote:
         | > one needs to tinker with even more flags to get Firefox to
         | acceptable performance
         | 
         | All you need is gfx.webrender.all, if you even failed the
         | qualification (most modern setups shouldn't fail it).
        
         | bufferoverflow wrote:
         | Seriously, FF on Ubuntu causes 100% CPU usage when watching
         | YouTube in 1080p. Meanwhile Chrome on Windows eats maybe 6-10%.
         | 
         | How is this not #1 priority to fix?
        
           | magicalhippo wrote:
           | Not much FF can do directly AFAIK, since it has to do with
           | the hardware decoding the drivers support.
           | 
           | I've used an addon for a while which fixed it by forcing
           | YouTube to serve h264 rather than vp9 content, as hardware
           | accelerated decoding of h264 worked but not vp9. But lately
           | it hasn't worked well. Haven't investigated if it was due to
           | newer content only being vp9 or if the addon stopped working.
        
             | GrayShade wrote:
             | I think it's a conflict with the sandbox, like it
             | https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1698778.
        
           | muizelaar wrote:
           | I'm pretty sure most users don't have this experience. Can
           | you post a link to a pastebin of your about:support or file a
           | bug?
        
             | TingPing wrote:
             | This is normal. Firefox is only now rolling out accelerated
             | decoding on Linux.
        
           | roca wrote:
           | Comparing across platforms is not a good idea. Different
           | drivers, APIs and platform OS issues dramatically affect
           | these results.
        
         | roca wrote:
         | Personally I just have layers.acceleration.force-enabled: true
         | and that's enough to get me fast 4K WebGL. WebRender and
         | Wayland dmabuf seem to turn on automatically. Intel 915, Fedora
         | 34, dual 4K monitors, distro Firefox 89.
        
           | GrayShade wrote:
           | Note that WebRender obsoletes Layers, so you shouldn't need
           | to set that.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | AHTERIX5000 wrote:
         | Yeah it's not great on Mac either. I have pretty much standard
         | Firefox installation with only Ublock Origin added and it's
         | extremely easy to get 16" Macbook Pro hot when Safari handles
         | the same load without too much heat.
        
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       (page generated 2021-07-02 23:02 UTC)