The Firefox compositor on macOS makes use of hardware acceleration via OpenGL. Why was our compositor always redrawing the entire window? The main reason was the lack of convenient APIs on macOS for partial compositing.

The improvements in Firefox 70 were the result of reducing the work in steps 2 and 3: In both steps, we were doing work for the entire window, even if only a small part of the window was updating. Step 3: The operating system’s window manager assembles all windows on the screen to produce the screen content. Step 2: The Firefox “compositor” assembles these Gecko layers to produce the rendering of the window. There are three major steps to getting pixels on the screen: Step 1: Firefox draws pixels into “Gecko layers”. Let’s take a brief look at how the Firefox compositing pipeline works. Read on for the technical details behind these changes. This makes my 2015 mbp without a dedicated dGPU become a power sipper compared to earlier builds. I usually try nightly builds every few weeks but end up going back to Edge Chromium or Chrome for speed and lack of heat. Charlie SiegelĪfter so many years, I have been able to use Firefox on my Mac – I used to test every Firefox release, and nothing had worked in the past. Thank you, I’m very happy to finally see Core Animation being implemented. Prior to this update I literally couldn’t use Firefox because it would spin my fans way up and slow down my whole computer. I’m seeing a huge improvement over here too (2015 13″ MacBook Pro with scaled resolutions on internal display as well as external 4K display). Users have reported much longer battery life, cooler machines and less fan spinning. The larger the Firefox window and the smaller the animation, the bigger the difference. In short, Firefox 70 improves power usage by 3x or more for many use cases. Power usage, in Watts, as displayed by Intel Power Gadget. As a result, Firefox 70 drastically reduces the power usage during browsing.

This allows us to do less work per frame when only small parts of the screen change. In Firefox 70 we changed how pixels get to the screen on macOS.

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