Mozilla Firefox is a pretty fast web browser, but now you can make it even faster by using the new WebRender technology. Even though everyone is talking about how WebRender is going to make Firefox so fast, Mozilla developers are saying that WebRender is not about making the web rendering faster, rather it makes the rendering a little bit smoother. It is available only in the Firefox Nightly as of now, but in the future it will be made available to the regular release channel as well. If you want to experience how fast or how smooth the websites load in Firefox with new WebRender technology, then you can follow these steps:
- Download and install Firefox Nightly from https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/nightly/.
- Launch Firefox nightly, type about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Dismiss the warranty warning.
- Type webrender in the search box.
- Find a setting named gfx.webrender.enabled and change its value to true.
- Find another setting named gfx.webrender.all and change its value to true.
- Restart Firefox Nightly and you will be using the new WebRender technology.
As Mozilla has already stated, this is only going to make the rendering of the webpages smoother and people should not expect sudden increase in the performance of the Firefox web browser. WebRender uses GPU to render the webpages which gives a much faster performance. According to Lin Clark from Mozilla, the web pages that chug along at 15fps in Chrome are going to run at 60fps with WebRender.
From the initial testing, it feels like that there won’t be much difference when loading some of the simple and ordinary websites with WebRender enabled. You will see real difference when using web apps in Firefox with WebRender enabled as it can give 60fps performance. Lin Clark goes on to explain that WebRender will render the webpages just like a 3D computer game.
You can read the detailed information about WebRender from https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/the-whole-web-at-maximum-fps-how-webrender-gets-rid-of-jank/.