Firefox 67 It came with a novelty that stood out from the rest: it was the first to activate WebRender, a new rendering engine that promised to improve the overall performance of the browser. Nothing less than a year and a half has passed since then, and Linux users are still waiting for its activation by default. Well then: from what it seems it will be in Firefox 84 when we no longer have to activate it manually, as we explained in its day in this article.
But let's keep calm. First of all, Mozilla warns that in the preliminary versions functions may appear that do not reach the stable version, and as an example we have that these, at least the Nightly ones, have a native system to manage the tabs in containers that has not reached the stable version (and I don't even expect it). On the other hand, Mozilla will also activate WebRender on Linux little by little, starting with those who use the X11 protocol.
WebRender is coming to Linux / X11 in Firefox 84
Initially, Mozilla has been delaying the arrival of WebRender to Linux due to stability problems, more specifically in Wayland users. For that reason, they will start with those of X11, but it also looks like it will for GNOME users.
Therefore, we are still going to have to continue to be patient. It is true that GNOME is a very widespread graphical environment that systems such as Fedora and Ubuntu use as the main option, but it is also true that many of us prefer Plasma or something lighter like Xface, so it will not rain to everyone's liking from the beginning. It is believed that it should work just as well in these graphical environments, but Mozilla wants to be careful.
Interested users can test Firefox 84 (Beta) by downloading the binaries from this link. On some Linux distributions, like Arch or Manjaro, they can compile and install it from the AUR.
What worries me is its compatibility with older hardware, currently the WebRender composition is only possible on compatible hardware starting from OpenGL 3.0 (if I remember correctly), so those that do not continue to work with OpenGL and without any form of WebRender is enabled because by default it requires the hardware to be able to render WebGL 2. I hope that this new engine will be able to render in the future even if the computer where it is running is not compatible with WebGL 2.