Servo WebRender Overview

The title on HN is very editorialized and I can&#x27;t overemphasize how preliminary and experimental this work is. Take all numbers with a huge grain of salt.<p>That said, I&#x27;m obviously really excited about this project. :) I feel strongly that it&#x27;s the right from-scratch, modern approach for painting Web content. Happy to answer any questions.

I&#x27;d love to see a Web renderer based on Vulkan. The reduced CPU overhead and much improved threading should be a huge win. You&#x27;d be able to cache on the command buffer level instead of just the vertex buffer level. Seems like a bleeding edge graphics API would be a good match for an experimental project like Servo as well.<p>To really use Vulkan as efficiently as possible, though, you&#x27;d probably want to write a renderer mostly from scratch rather than maintaining some sort of abstraction layer to support both GL and Vulkan.

Is there an explanation of how exactly this differs from current browsers?<p>All things that are described in the page seem pretty &quot;normal&quot; and &quot;obvious&quot; things to do, so it&#x27;s not quite clear which things are not being done in current browsers.

I know servo and project around it are all experimental, but I can&#x27;t help but feel excited about it.

Great thing to see being worked on. Out of curiosity does any of Moz2D&#x27;s back-ends support stencil then cover approach to rendering on the gpu.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;on-demand.gputechconf.com&#x2F;gtc&#x2F;2012&#x2F;presentations&#x2F;S0024-GPU-Accelerated-Path-Rendering.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;on-demand.gputechconf.com&#x2F;gtc&#x2F;2012&#x2F;presentations&#x2F;S002...</a><p>At first I thought it might be a good idea to implement a gallium statetracker for such a framework but with the direct3d statetracker not being supported by projects like wine I thought maybe vulkan will open up an opportunity to implement something with similar performance which is driver,vendor and platform agnostic.

I often run browsers over ssh and I really hope this &quot;draw programs like a game engine&quot; stuff doesn&#x27;t catch on.<p>This is already the approach taken by Chrome (trace Chrome and you&#x27;ll just see a bunch of full window resolution PutImage calls), and it&#x27;s very slow over the network, I get around 1 fps.<p>Firefox on the other hand uses more X11 calls, and it&#x27;s much more responsive, close to running it locally.