How to Try Out Mozilla’s WebRender Ahead of the Public Launch in Firefox 67

[The AchieVer]

How to Try Out Mozilla’s WebRender Ahead of the Public Launch in Firefox 67 

 

The next version of Mozilla Firefox is due this week, and in addition to several new features, it will also introduce something that’s not necessarily visible at first glance.

 

With Firefox 67, Mozilla plans to begin the rollout of WebRender, a feature that the company started working on more than three years ago.

A commit spotted in September 2015 indicated that Mozilla was working a new technology supposed to enhance the experience online in a new way. WebRender was meant to push the web to “maximum FPS,” technically helping users get smoother browsing thanks to the processing power that their devices boast.

WebRender, as Mozilla itself puts it, is already famous for “being extremely fast,” but at the same time, it’s a technology that can help make the browsing experience smoother.

“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 said.

Firefox 67 will thus mark the introduction of WebRender for the first users, and Mozilla says the rollout will happen gradually.

Only 5% of the users will receive the new system enabled in Firefox based on a series of conditions that are yet to be revealed. However, it’s believed that users must be running Windows 10 and have NVIDIA graphics boards, albeit this is something that is yet to be confirmed.

The rollout will take place in stages, so while only a few users would get the new feature at first, more would receive it as Mozilla conducts more testing and receives more information on the actually performance gains.

But at the same time, it’s actually possible to enable WebRender even before Mozilla rolls it out officially for your own installation of Firefox. The steps here work in both the beta version and Nightly builds of Firefox, and they are very likely to cover the stable version of Firefox 67 as well once it launches later this week.

 

 

First and foremost, there won’t be a dedicated option to enable WebRender in Firefox, so you’ll have to do the whole thing from the advanced flags screen.

So what you need to do is to launch the browser and in the address bar to type the following command:

about:config

In the address bar, you need to search for the following flag:

gfx.webrender.all
 
If WebRender isn’t enabled on your device, it should be set to false, so click the Toggle button to switch it to true. Mozilla Firefox then needs to be restarted to save your changes and enable WebRender.

Once enabled, WebRender should help make the performance overall smoother in Firefox, and the most visible changes will be on high-end displays with enough graphics power.

Mozilla could provide more information on the implementation of WebRender in this new Firefox version later this week when the rollout of the new browser begins. In the meantime, it’s not yet clear who gets it, but the aforementioned steps can be used not only on Windows, but also on Linux.

Firefox is currently considered the only worthy alternative to Chromium-powered browsers, including here Google Chrome, Vivaldi, and the new Microsoft Edge. Updates and new technologies like this one certainly help the browser become an even better browser, but it remains to be seen how the feature will be received by users worldwide.

 

 

 

 

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