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Comment by stuaxo | Hacker News Reader

Flac playback and more work on E10s, this is a pretty sweet release.

Switching to Skia on linux for rendering is interesting too, I wonder how this affects rendering performance and correctness vs cairo ?

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I had to look up what E10s was.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

>In Mozilla documentation "Electrolysis" is often shorted as "e10s".

You probably got a more relevant result by searching for "E10s" than if you had searched for "Electrolysis", too.

true but I've heard of Electrolysis in Firefox

Heh, I'd have written a more explanatory post, but was busy at work.

According to http://www.slideshare.net/SamsungOSG/duel-of-two-libraries-c... Skia is faster than Cairo in most benchmarks, but the settings are very fiddly and it's easy to get incorrect results if you're not careful. It's owned by Google though, so I'd expect it to be possible to get good results. Also it says the API is not stable? That sounds like a big downside. I hope the speed gains are worth it.

So they use Skia now? I would have expected them to rather switch to WebRender.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/Quantum_Render

Gecko was already using Skia on Windows and Mac, so enabling Skia on Linux helps consolidate the graphics code.

WebRender is actively being ported to Gecko (the "Quantum Render" project), but it is a large effort and won't ship until late 2017. It's an all-or-nothing feature, so it can't be enabled incrementally.

I wonder if Quantum plans to use Vulkan for rendering when it's available?

It seems it will happen eventually, but not at this time[0]. There are likely higher priority changes which need to be made.

[0] https://github.com/servo/webrender/issues/186

Interesting, thanks!

I was using Skia in Firefox on Linux for a while already. It works OK. I also force layers acceleration, since it still blacklists Mesa it seems.

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