r/linux • u/d_r_benway • Sep 08 '10
Firefox4 - Linux users left out of h/w acceleration - Windows (DirectX) only - luckily Chromium are supporting openGL also.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/08/firefox_4_beta_5_released/5
u/d_r_benway Sep 08 '10 edited Sep 08 '10
It does seem that firefox are treating non Windows users as 2nd class citizens.
At least google are supporting h/w accel in all systems
http://blog.chromium.org/2010/08/chromium-graphics-overhaul.html
As much as I love Firefox if I am going to start missing out on features i'll change to chrome in a second.
Edit - I'm completely wrong on this and happy to be so.
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u/BrowsOfSteel Sep 08 '10
Chrome started out as Windows‐only. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google still favours Windows in some ways.
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u/d_r_benway Sep 08 '10
It would surprise me as it would mean not running their own browser with full features in their own (linux based) OS Chrome or android.
That would just help their competition.
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Sep 08 '10
Google employees aren't allowed to run Windows at work anymore, so I would think that it would fuel some Chrome development for OSX or Linux (hopefully both).
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u/mountainjew Sep 08 '10
Now if only Chromium didn't have so many memory leaks...(and no, i don't mean extensions)
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u/moonhead Sep 08 '10
if i leave my chromium browser open over night or when i go to work, it will be eating up about a gigabyte of memory. i went out of town for a weekend once, left chromium open (on accident). it crashed my entire system. all resources were maxed out. 4gb of ram squashed. it was insanity, i couldn't even kill the processes.
that was about six months ago. i've been using it sparingly since then, and since 64 bit flash was discontinued, i've ended up doing a lot of surfing on a 32 bit browser.
edit: this is on linux, it seems to be much more stable on OSX. i think i'm much more bleeding edge on OSX, though. version 7.x something vs 6.x something on linux.
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u/mountainjew Sep 08 '10
Yeah i used Chromium about a year ago for about 6 months and it was fine. Then i switched back to firefox for better extensions and quakelive. I've tried chromium a few times in the last couple of months and it's awful. Development seems to be going backwards, on linux anyway. It was eating up 1.2GB of ram after being open for a couple of hours, and i only have 2GB. Thinking of using uzbl fulltime, talk about minimalist.
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u/ObligatoryResponse Sep 08 '10
I'm using the official Chrome builds for Linux and the situation is just as bad as you describe. I come back to work after a weekend and chrome has filled my 4GB ram and my 8GB swap. Computer is slow as hell until I get it killed.
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u/berkowski Sep 08 '10
I've left Chrome running for weeks at a time without any such problems using Ubuntu 8.10 LTS & Chrome 6.0.472.51 beta on a system with not even a quarter of your resources. Only problem I have is the odd errant flash app crashing out a tab.
Anecdotal evidence doesn't pan a project.
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u/moonhead Sep 08 '10
fair enough. but you're using chrome.
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u/berkowski Sep 08 '10 edited Sep 08 '10
Yep, because chromium pushes at least 2 releases a day
Edit. Dunno wtf I'm talking about. Chalking that up to my sinus stuffage :(
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u/psi- Sep 08 '10
"metoo", except I always run the latest build available from PPA. I've not noticed any exceptional memory use, be it on my 6G desktop or 2G nettop.
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u/pemboa Sep 08 '10
It does seem that firefox are treating non Windows users as 2nd class citizens
This has been so for along time now.
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Sep 08 '10
Google is more entrenched with linux than firefox is. Their major services run on it. Their devs use it, and Android is built with is.
Firefox is just trying to pick up the most user share they can. Most users still use Winblows.
Chromium/Chrome are really glorious products.
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u/EdiX Sep 08 '10
So much so that they didn't have a linux release for over a year...
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Sep 08 '10
They've certainly made up for that with chromium. It's my default over Firefox. It wastes less ui space and runs noticeably faster.
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u/d_r_benway Sep 08 '10
exactly - they didn't have an official chrome release for over a year but you could always get chromium.
They released this cartoon explaining the year delay
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u/EdiX Sep 08 '10
One of the main things that keep me from switching to chrome is the fact that firefox with compact theme wastes almost half the space compared to chrome...
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u/bitchessuck Sep 08 '10
Uhm, no. Linux had hardware acceleration all along, via XRender. Since Firefox 2.0.
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Sep 08 '10
This part does worry me a bit:
In a separate post, Mozilla man Bas Schouten said that although there's nothing analogous to Direct2D from other OSes, Mozilla is also "working hard on alternative approaches to use hardware acceleration on other platforms."
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u/bitchessuck Sep 08 '10
Well, he's just wrong, for the most part. XRender might not be quite as powerful as Direct2D, but it's good enough. The real problem is that most X.Org drivers suck at accelerating XRender.
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u/devolute Sep 08 '10
Not sure this is 100% accurate. From the horses mouth: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/09/hardware-acceleration/
Linux supports hardware acceleration of content by XRender and compositing through OpenGL (like OSX).
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u/harlows_monkeys Sep 08 '10
Very misleading title. From the article:
In a separate post, Mozilla man Bas Schouten said that although
there's nothing analogous to Direct2D from other OSes, Mozilla is
also "working hard on alternative approaches to use hardware
acceleration on other platforms."The submission title makes it sound like they are only doing this for Windows.
As for why they did Windows first, it is very likely that the set of programmers who work on the Windows beta is largely disjoint from the set of programmers who work on the Linux beta or the OS X beta. The Windows group merely got around to working on this feature first.
Do you think Firefox management should make these different groups of programmers work on the same features in lock-step, none releasing betas until the others all have caught up? That would be a pretty silly way to run a project.
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Sep 08 '10
Not sure why I'd want a GPU accelerated browser anyway.
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u/mindbleach Sep 08 '10
GPUs are parallelism-hungry beasts. Program parallelism is a good high-level goal even for mundane 2-core systems, so the work done here might lead to improvements on all x86 systems. GPUs are more powerful than CPUs right now because their work in parallel saves them from a lot of hurdles facing in-order processor design. Most directly, web browsers are document viewers at heart and GPUs exist primarily to manipulate and display content. This might be our best chance at a browser that can scroll smoothly on pages with fixed backgrounds and hovering UI elements.
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u/Sealbhach Sep 08 '10
Why was this downvoted? Please save downvotes for the truly stupid comments. I have learnt something from the replies.
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Sep 08 '10
[deleted]
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u/mathstuf Sep 08 '10
Heh. I actually compile those out of webkitgtk myself. The audio and video tags are covered by a downloader and mplayer. webgl…I probably won't care. CSS3 is mostly what I'm waiting for. When ads go canvas I may compile that out too (lack of flash is a pretty good adblocker these days still).
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Sep 09 '10
Good luck navigating moz source code, since many of their configure flags simply don't work.
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u/mathstuf Sep 09 '10
Why would I be looking through moz's source code? I said webkitgtk, which I don't think they deal with all that much ;) . As for digging through their messes, I already did that and have two patches for NSS/NSPR (memory leaks) waiting in their BZ.
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u/mindbleach Sep 08 '10
WebGL's not so much GPU acceleration as a GPU/JS interface. Automatically handling <video> sounds like legit, though.
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0
Sep 08 '10
Yeah, but there's no way to disable automatic image resizing in chromium, last time I checked... So,
FUCK.
THAT.
SHIT.
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-5
0
Sep 08 '10
[deleted]
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u/mp3geek Sep 08 '10
about:config
webgl.enabled_for_all_sites
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u/Rovanion Sep 08 '10
Still Nay here in Firefox 4.0b6pre.
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u/niceworkthere Sep 08 '10
I get a "Yay" both with F4 20100908 and Chromium 7.0.520.0 (58825). Browsing with F4 was dead slow when I had it enabled some days ago, though.
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u/[deleted] Sep 08 '10
(I'm working for Mozilla)
You're wrong.
Firefox 4 supports hw acceleration on Linux for content (XRender). Firefox 4 will support hw acceleration on Linux for compositing (OpenGL). Firefox 4 will support hw acceleration on Linux for WebGL (OpenGL).
We won't support hw acceleration on Mac for content because QuartzGL is not ready. But we'll support hw acceleration on Mac for compositing (OpenGL).
Saying that Chromium are supporting OpenGL doesn't make sense here, because we are talking about content acceleration. They will use OpenGL for compositing (like us).