I was not saying the plans don't make sense, only that the ordering turns out to be unfortunate. I am also not suggesting we modify the plan, as the WebRender trajectory is not conducive to being a blocker for any work planed for 57 (as has been pointed out). I do think people should keep WebRender in mind and not overly design for 57, or at least not put in constraints we can't undo easily once they are not necessary.
Regarding the percentage of users who have GPUs, I would suggest we keep in mind that since we want to win back users to Firefox we shouldn't be judging new engine features by the small population of current users, but by the population of users who might switch. If we build an engine that is a lot better for people with GPUs, you can expect those people will be more motivated to try it out. Our target audience is much larger than our existing users, and may have quite different hardware profiles. jack. On Tue, Apr 18, 2017 at 5:22 PM, Ehsan Akhgari <ehsan.akhg...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 2017-04-18 1:53 PM, Justin Dolske wrote: >> >> >> On Tue, Apr 18, 2017 at 1:19 AM, Jack Moffitt <j...@metajack.im >> <mailto:j...@metajack.im>> wrote: >> >> > Another really nice effort that is starting to unfold and I'm super >> excited >> > about is the new Photon performance project >> > <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1348289 >> <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1348289>>, which is a >> focused >> > effort on the front-end performance. This includes everything from >> > engineering the new UI with things like animations running on the >> > compositor in mind from the get-go, being laser focused on guaranteeing >> > good performance on key UI interactions such as tab opening and >> closing, >> > and lots of focused measurements and fixes to the browser front-end. >> >> I think the order of operations here is unfortunate. What we'd prefer >> is that WebRender land first, and then Photon be designed around what >> is possible in the GPU-backed world. >> >> >> That's a complete non-starter. Photon work is already underway, and >> there's a _ton_ of work to do for the 57 release. > > If I can clarify a bit, the main goal of Photon isn't to be a showcase > of WebRender capabilities. The main goal of that project is to get a > much more responsive UI than what we currently have. Obviously for the > implementation we would love to use every bit of power that Gecko > provides, but we can't rely on anything that will not be 100% certainly > be part of the 57 release. The last time I checked with the graphics > team, at this point it's completely unclear whether Quantum Render is > going to make it, and as such, it's not reasonable for us to depend on > anything that WebRender provides for Photon, because if QR wouldn't make > it to 57 then we wouldn't have a backup plan. > > All in all we have a lot of ongoing projects and they each have > different scales and different degrees of risk associated with them, and > we are trying hard to be really careful on what project depends on what > other project to try to protect ourselves from cases where project X > doesn't make it in time taking project Y down with it. :-) Photon is > such an important piece of the puzzle that making it depend on anything > that isn't super certain is extremely risky, and without Photon the > entire release plan for the whole Quantum is going to be jeopardized, > and that isn't an acceptable risk. > > I hope this helps make the plans make more sense. If they still don't, > I'm happy to answer more questions! > > Cheers, > Ehsan > _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
