Mozilla to fully ship WebRender to all its Firefox users with Firefox version 92. This also makes it as default rendering engine on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android versions. With Firefox 93, you can no longer disable WebRender, the company has removed the preference from Mozilla Central and changed the environmental variable that allows doing so.
What is Firefox WebRender?
WebRender renders the pages faster and smoother.
Mozilla has invested a lot of time in the WebRender rendering engine. The company has added it to Firefox from Servo.
Firefox 67 is the first version that shipped this rendering engine to some devices.
How to check WebRender is enabled in Firefox
- Visit about:support
- Scroll down to Graphics,
- Check for the compositor field value, if the value says WebRender, then it is enabled in the Firefox browser.
This process of knowing if Firefox is using WebRenderer or not, no longer required going forward with the next Firefox verison.
Mozilla to fully ship WebRender with Firefox 92 on Windows and Android
Till now, WebRenderer has shipped to MacOS (Firefox 83) and Linux (Firefox 91).
It will be available and enabled by default on all devices on Windows and Android with Firefox 92.
“As of Firefox 92, WebRender has shipped to our entire release population. In 92, the pref that allowed fallback to layers was reset”, WebRender where wiki page says.
“Android: shipping to all devices (Firefox 92)”
Firefox 93 won’t allow disabling WebRender
The pref gfx.webrender.force-legacy-layers will be removed.
If you look to set an environment variable MOZ_WEBRENDER=0 for the same, it will do nothing.
Depending upon theur pltatform configuration, users may get either HW-WR or SW-WR, and MOZ_WEBRENDER=1 continues to force except if gfx.webrender.software is true.
Related to Firefox 92, we recently covered it blocks insecure downloads, so security and performance improvements coming together with the next version.
Version 92 is scheduled to release on September 07.
More on Firefox:
‘Firefox Suggest’: Mozilla tests Sponsored Search Suggestions
Mozilla’s UA String experiment to check if Firefox version 100 breaks websites
You can now use Firefox to Autofill other Apps on Android
Firefox 91 Supports opening downloads automatically, like Chrome
