Platform/GFX/Firefox.next

Detailed list of projects

Feature/Request	Contact	Reason	GFX Owner	Priority
Fennec Layers Acceleration	Blizzard/Stuart	For best possible performance on Fennec layers are required to be accelerated on Fennec.	Jrmuizel & Bjacob	P1
NPAPI Async Drawing Extension	Bas	With the release of IE9 and Flash 10.2 IE has created an easier method for windowless plugin drawing. For performance and other reasons (such as the current elaborate background copying/alpha recovery scheme) a more efficient drawing model for windowless plugins is required.	Bas & Roc	P1
NPAPI Mac Plugin Async Drawing	josh	to be filled in	Benwa & Josh	P1
Electrolysis Accelerated Layers	Blizzard	In order not to regress performance in electrolysis builds all types of accelerated layers need to be able to operate in conjunction with electrolysis.	Bas & cjones	P1
Azure	Internal	Replacing cairo with a more modern, flexible graphics library is deemed needed for a variety of performance & long term multiprocess needs	Bas & Roc	P1
Layers 3D Transforms	Roc	CSS 3D transforms need to be supported by layers for good performance when we start supporting them.	Mattwoodrow	P1
WebGL antialiasing	bjacob	Even though it's not a normative part of the spec, WebGL defaults to antialiasing, Chrome already supports it, and it's very visible for the end-user	bjacob & jrmuizel	P2
Fennec Gradient Performance	Blizzard	Common use cases slowed down by poorly performing gradients on ARM	tbd	P2
Accelerated Layers on X11	?	Important feature that's still not default on X11. Matt's patches in bug 640082 are a large part of the work there, but there remains the Flash crash and probably some reftest failures.	Bjacob & Mattwoodrow	P2
WebGL 1.0 full conformance	bjacob	There's a good WebGL conformance test suite, and we already pass 98% of it. Make it 100%.	bjacob	P2
WebGL float textures extension	bjacob	This is a massively useful extension, Chrome supports it, and some cool WebGL apps require it.	tbd (I think that Vlad had a patch)	P2
WebGL on Windows: default to OpenGL using D3D interop where possible	bjacob	Not using ANGLE can allow for a great performance boost, given good OpenGL drivers and D3D interop.	bjacob & jrmuizel	P2
Cross Process WebGL	Stuart(Fennec) Blizzard(Desktop)	In the future we will need a way to render WebGL fast, without readback from a content process and render it into the composition process, to avoid the performance impact from readback to software.	tbd	P2
Fennec 2D HW Acceleration	Stuart	2D Hardware Acceleration is important on mobile to further improve performance characteristics.	tbd	P2
Container Layer Masking/Clipping	Roc	Make container layers support clip-path, filter and mask APIs, including clipping to rounded-rectangles, so we can avoid dropping down to fallback, avoiding performance hits.	tbd	P2
Border Drawing Performance	Roc	Border drawing is currently slower than it should be, this requires work.	tbd	P2
Accelerated Filters	Roc	Numerous filters could potentially be accelerated through layers. Leading to performance improvements.	tbd bug 644368 (partly)	P2
Async Publishing of Video Frames	Roc	Needs motivation	tbd bug 598868	P2
Implement new CSS Font Spec	jfkthame & jdaggett	tbd	P2
Layers Animation API	Roc	By making animations implicitly supported inside layers, those animations can be executed asynchronously in the composition process, allowing for smoother animation.	tbd	P3
Common Benchmark Perf Improvements	Blizzard	It's important to perform well on commonly quoted benchmarks. Even when they are not necessarily representative of common browser usage they strongly influence impression of browser performance.	tbd	?

Old list

Lower fruit

• Improve video performance - profiling and fixing problems
• better qcms ICCv4 support
  • jrmuizel
• CSS 3D transforms
  • bjacob
  • joe

Medium sized

• Define new 2D API and prototype it on D2D
• Implement cairo-surface-backend and Quartz backends for new 2D API
• Implement GL backend for new 2D API
• border support in layers (9 part layers) - this should let us hardware accelerate border type effects better
  • joe
  • roc: I'm not sure what the goal is here. We need to rework border drawing on the layout side, but I don't think layers and borders are related.
• accelerated layers on linux
  • bjacob
  • joe
• switch away from xlib to cairo-gl and/or image backends on linux (note: the size of this item depends a lot on the current status of cairo-gl: how much do we need to fix it ourselves?)
  • bjacob
  • joe - but we should probably not put more than one person on this
• integrate cairo-gl (maybe just for canvas?) on Mac and Linux (and maybe WinXP with ANGLE?)
  • bjacob
  • joe
• themeing using GetThemeBitmap() - bug 561265
• Hardware accelerated plugin layers on windows
• Layerize all remaining containers, namely SVG mask/clip-path/filters
• Animation of layer properties offloaded to the compositing process
• any WebGL work that would not make it into 4.0 (optimizations, still-in-flux parts of the spec such as color correction, lost-context events, using ARB_robustness...?)
  • bjacob

Things that would be nice

• software rasterizer tuning - we could probably use a quick and dirty rasterizer for mobile where the pixels are small

18 month possibilities

MoCo managers are trying to create a list of the work needing to be accomplished over the next 18 months. The idea is to build a better picture of where we need to hire, train, etc. Following is the work we think we might want the GFX group to accomplish in the next 18 months.

1. azure completed
   1. 2D and 3D parts
   2. option for accelerated layers on desktop
   3. option for accelerated layers on mobile
   4. cross process remoting
2. webgl
   1. anti-aliasing
   2. ongoing spec compliance work (even for 1.0)
   3. webgl 2.0
   4. on going security and performance work
   5. E10S support
3. Imagelib
   1. code debt reduction
   2. on going security and performance work
4. telemetry/metrics
   1. better measurement of real-world performance
5. text
   1. complete font spec implementation
   2. harfbuzz full script coverage
6. OpenCL/WebCL
7. GLES Layers
8. Fully color corrected pipeline
9. Hardware-accelerated SVG filters
10. D3D11 Layers

This list is not a roadmap or a committed plan, its a rough outline of some of the big things we are likely to want to do. In general I think we have the right skillsets, we just need more people with them. The only exceptions are perhaps 6) and 9) - some more hard core shader/HLSL expertise might be helpful.