I can't comment on the burden of maintaining the code, nor on how much work dot releases are for the release team. But I can say that if this feature is now working there will be many opportunities to use it. I wouldn't say its not working has gone unnoticed for 5 years - we knew it not to work, but perhaps overestimated how difficult it would be to get to work. We've had to do a lot of dot releases over the course of the webrender rollout due to driver bugs causing severe glitches, crashes, or making the browser completely unusable. Due to very low nightly and beta populations we often don't have such issues reported until they hit release. While webrender rollout is basically complete now, these bugs can still occur due to driver updates on the phone (as was in the case in bug 1688017), landing improvements which require new GL features (eg bug 1683936, causing a dot release on Dec 23rd), or even simple refactorings that should have no effect (eg bug 1709548). Assuming reasonably dot releases are a greater pain to do than maintaining the code, I'd argue in favour of keeping the feature.
Bug 1715788 Comment 13 Edit History
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I can't comment on the burden of maintaining the code, nor on how much work dot releases are for the release team. But I can say that if this feature is now working there will be many opportunities to use it. I wouldn't say its not working has gone unnoticed for 5 years - we knew it not to work, but perhaps overestimated how difficult it would be to get to work. We've had to do a lot of dot releases over the course of the webrender rollout due to driver bugs causing severe glitches, crashes, or making the browser completely unusable. Due to very low nightly and beta populations we often don't have such issues reported until they hit release. While webrender rollout is basically complete now, these bugs can still occur due to driver updates on the phone (as was in the case in bug 1688017), landing improvements which require new GL features (eg bug 1683936, causing a dot release on Dec 23rd), or even simple refactorings that should have no effect (eg bug 1709548). Assuming frequent dot releases are a greater pain to do than maintaining the code, I'd argue in favour of keeping the feature.