WebRender, is a 2D renderer for the web. It started as Servo‘s graphics engine, and we are in the process of integrating it in Firefox. I have been meaning for a while to write about what WebRender is, how it works and how its architecture is different from what Firefox and other browsers currently do. To do that, I first wanted to provide some context and look at what Firefox (and other browser e

Originally published on Nikhil’s blog. Introduction Traditionally, browsers have been written as single threaded applications, and the html spec certainly seems to validate this statement. This makes it difficult to parallelize any task which a browser carries out, and we generally have to come up with innovative ways to do so. One such task is HTML parsing, and I have been working on parallelizin

You may have heard of Project Quantum… it’s a major rewrite of Firefox’s internals to make Firefox fast. We’re swapping in parts from our experimental browser, Servo, and making massive improvements to other parts of the engine. The project has been compared to replacing a jet engine while the jet is still in flight. We’re making the changes in place, component by component, so that you can see th