14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla seems to be ready to kick off the rollout of WebRender, a new system whose purpose is to make rendering much smoother by pushing it even beyond 60 frames per second.
As per this reddit thread, Mozilla will enable WebRender for 5% of the users beginning with the release of Firefox 67, with the rollout to advance gradually in the next updates.
WebRender was first spotted in a commit back in September 2015, and work on the project continued in the last years to bring the new tech closer to being ready for all users.
Mozilla explained in an October 2017 blog post that WebRender “fundamentally changes the way the rendering engine works to make it more like a 3D game engine.”
New Firefox version coming later this week
So the purpose of WebRender isn’t necessarily to make rendering faster, but smoother especially on devices where the necessary hardware exists.
“With WebRender, we want apps to run at a silky smooth 60 frames per second (FPS) or better no matter how big the display is or how much of the page is changing from frame to frame. And it works. Pages that chug along at 15 FPS in Chrome or today’s Firefox run at 60 FPS with WebRender,” Mozilla explained at that point.
While specifics haven’t been provided, it’s believed WebRender could only become available for Windows 10 users at first, and Mozilla might only enable it on devices where an NVIDIA GPU is detected. This is the reason the company goes for a gradual rollout, as Mozilla first wants to gain more data on how rendering is improved before more devices are getting the new feature.
Mozilla Firefox 67 is projected to launch tomorrow for stable users on Windows, Linux, and macOS.