Gecko esr91 work (former "Flypig's gecko dev diary")

Platform Development
#81

@flypig just read your diary and noticing that you seem to be in the render engine swamp (Note: i dont have experience with firefox per se, but made my bones whilst wrestling with alot of game engines in the past); my bet is the change from back buffer to swap chain on the opengl side is what has broken the rendering (swap chain set up differs from.“normal” double buffering), also readback for the offscreen / headless rendering might differ (not sure about that); btw I havent paid attention so just adding this here in case: env var LIBGL_DEBUG (on mesa at least, see here for more https://docs.mesa3d.org/envvars.html ) can add precious hints to the output…

EDIT : also and now we might have a real bone here, the Wayland integration on OpenGL might need some love too…but this is just speculation…

bottom line, I’d say if you can trace the OpenGL Error first, it will be a good lead where to look next, as the code that you are merging is “a child between worlds” and hence has no real reference / is a new path (code)…

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#82

I have a naive question - Firefox has a ‘reader view’ mode.
Do you know if the feature could be enabled for SFOS gecko builds? I mean, do you know if it is it ‘simply’ about enabling something?

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#83

Secret pictures leaked from flypig hq:

_e4750463-9690-4556-a0f0-c4ac741575ab
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A pig with wings lying on a hammok in a forest. A gecko sleeping on a stone. Comic style

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A pig with wings is playing a tabletop game with a gecko on a cloud in the sky. A surgery coat is hanging at the cloud. Impressionism. Watercolors.

(At least I hope this is the reason for the gap. I think i would’ve never sustained nearly as long)

Edit: my bad, probably my browser just played games with me, i thought there is a break in the dev-diary

5 Likes
#84

You’re right, no gap, just slow progress!

These pictures are so brilliant though @thigg; thank you for creating them! And surprisingly accurate too :wink: I’m a little concerned about those chess pieces though. That’s not a type of chess I’m familiar with!

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#85

The prompt said tabletop game… So I guess that is not chess :wink: (or the gecko is playing by its own rules…) Maybe next time i should ask it to print the rules as well.
I like the stethoscope in the second picture :wink: I guess that symbolizes debugging the old and the new engine at the same time

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#86

I have the same problem I think. Some times I have to manually update the Flypig’s gecko dev diary feed. I have had three days with no new post, until I manually update.

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#87

Never experienced that (so glad I checked on desktop though, as the ghost is missing on phone, amazing spooky theme)

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#88

I hadn’t notice that! Your stethoscope description made me laugh out loud on the train… that’s a wonderful result from the AI :grin:

Sorry for this. It’s possible I missed out a closing HTML tag or something like that, which has caused the feed to get gunged up. I’ll run a check against it to see if anything obvious comes up that I can fix.

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#89

No problem. I use an old feed reader (QuiteRSS) so it could also be the one that’s getting too old .

#90

A quick update: finally ESR 91 rendering is working. Thanks to everyone for the exceptional help, ideas and support, which have properly blown me away.

Rendering is only one step in the journey, there’s still a lot more to do; my estimation is that this is still less than half way through getting ESR 91 usable. But this should make the remaining steps that much easier.

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#91

:drum: great work!
As humans we definitely appreciate visual feedback more than anything:)
This turned out more heavy than porting the entire SFOS to a new device, but as I said, it is also more useful.

And it is potentially a more collaborative enterprise :crossed_fingers:

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#92

Congratulations on reaching this milestone!

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#93

Congratulations! That is a huge milestone!

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#94

Thank you very very much @flypig !

Q: can I update the browser to new version while I’m still on 4.4.0.72 on the Volla phone?

Q: how can I do the update on Xperia 10 / 4.5.0.24?

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#95

Congratulations!
Insane effort not only for the porting, but also for the excellent and detailed blogging! How do I get this version on my phone now? :slight_smile:

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#96

In his blog is written that touch interface is not working yet. So no usable rpm yet.

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#97

Thanks for info, so I’ll wait patiently.

#98

Yeah, this is likely to be at a distance counted in months. Super-excited nevertheless!

#99

Thanks again flypig & all who help!

May I ask (and sorry if this was touched on before in this thread) - is this huge effort something that needs to be done every time one wants to push the browser to a new firefox-ESR version, or will we be able to benefit from the current effort for the next ESR-to-ESR upgrade?

flypig’s first post on gecko dev touches on this, saying it’s always a huge effort, but I still wonder if there could be some larger benefit for the future here.

edit: snarkiness is not required. This is a valid question even though it was touched on before. No dev likes the idea that their huge effort is one-time-only.

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#100

Seems you already know the answer to your question.

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