549116 - (d2d) Enable Direct2D by default

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[Jeff Muizelaar [:jrmuizel]]

A tracking bug for enabling direct2d by default

Comment 1

[Gary [:streetwolf52]]

Addblock Plus breaks 2d2.  Stylish does not.  I'm not really sure the difference between 2d2 and dw.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.3a2pre) Gecko/20100227 Minefield/3.7a2pre - Build ID: 20100227151012

Comment 2

[Bas Schouten (:bas.schouten)]

If one's broken, then both are, since we read both the prefs at platform initialization time.

Comment 3

[Jim Jeffery not reading bug-mail 1/2/11]

With D2D & DW enabled go to www.google.com 

the page does not load fully - moving the cursor anywhere in the page reveals the rest of the page, i.e. the header at top etc...

Latest hourly trunk m-c, and I'm running at default DPI for the time being.

Comment 4

[Bas Schouten (:bas.schouten)]

(In reply to comment #3)
> With D2D & DW enabled go to www.google.com 
> 
> the page does not load fully - moving the cursor anywhere in the page reveals
> the rest of the page, i.e. the header at top etc...
> 
> Latest hourly trunk m-c, and I'm running at default DPI for the time being.

It's a new 'feature' from google I think. If it's of any comfort, I thought a couple of weeks ago that I broke it with D2D as well.

Comment 5

[Jim Jeffery not reading bug-mail 1/2/11]

With d2d and dw enabled visit:
http://www.intellicast.com/National/Radar/Current.aspx?location=default

the map does not fully render.  Clicking View Image will display the image.
While on that map - click the animate button - radar does not animate, again clicking view image will start the animation, but it seems its only showing 2 frames of the loop and it flashes badly doing that...

Comment 6

[Peter Lairo]

Related bug: bug 549115

Comment 7

[Gary [:streetwolf52]]

When adding/disabling/uninstalling add-ons you may have to restart FF twice in order for d2d to work.  Same thing for changing Options. Changing/adding a style with Stylish sometimes breaks D2D.  A double restart is needed.  Then there are times D2D just breaks for unknown reasons.

Also there are a couple of themes that have separate optional extensions to
customize the themes more fully.  One is Chromifox Extreme which uses Chromifox
Companion extension.  The other is Strata40 which uses Stratabuddy extension. 
Both of these extensions (not the themes) break d2d.

Some themes break D2D where no amount of restarts will fix it.

Also images don't always download all the way.  You can have just a few lines
of the picture, half of the picture, etc.  

Oh yeah, the letters w and v display badly. Screenshot at http://img265.yfrog.com/img265/7688/capturetg.jpg

Comment 8

[Gary [:streetwolf52]]

I suggest getting rid of bug 549115 and just use this one.

Comment 9

[Danial Horton]

Session Manager prevents Firefox from enabling D2D, tested with my extension loaded profile and verified in a clean profile.

Comment 10

[Bas Schouten (:bas.schouten)]

(In reply to comment #8)
> I suggest getting rid of bug 549115 and just use this one.

If it's to do with text, it's DirectWrite. If it's to do with other graphics, it's Direct2D. The two are hardly related :).

Comment 11

[Gary [:streetwolf52]]

A development build for Addblock Plus works fine with D2D.  Here's the link to it:

[url=https://adblockplus.org/devbuilds/adblockplus/adblockplus-1.1.3+.2010022502.xpi]https://adblockplus.org/devbuilds/adblo ... 022502.xpi[/url]

Comment 12

[Gary [:streetwolf52]]

oops try this

https://adblockplus.org/devbuilds/adblockplus/adblockplus-1.1.3+.2010022502.xpi

Comment 13

[Gary [:streetwolf52]]

Scrolling every now and then becomes quite sluggish.  No rhyme or reason to it but it always corrects itself.

Comment 14

[Gary [:streetwolf52]]

I think the sluggish scrolling might be caused by using Full page zoom (not text only) on some of my sites.  It also seems to slow down d2d/dw as noticed in the sites I use to test it.

Comment 15

[Shaun]

Besides 0 and 6, what other integers trigger valid render modes in mozilla.widget.render-mode?

Comment 16

[Danial Horton]

https://www.mozdev.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=22532

Could use some help from other testers, and anyone that knows why a extension would kill D2D.

Comment 17

[Danial Horton]

I think i found an interesting issue,  after having switched to windows classic theme, firefox now crashes on image heavy sites while D2D is enabled.

however switching back to Aero glass/standard its fine.

Comment 18

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

So, what is the intention here?  If it is to keep this as an over-rideable preference I am OK with that.  However, if this is to be the only option going forward at some point,k I have serious issues here.  I presume that most people see a noticeable improvement wit this enabled.  However, with my hardware, I see nothing the is measurably faster and many things that go form working reasonably fast ot unusably slow with this enabled.

Comment 19

[Brian Carpenter [:geeknik]]

Bill, as far as I know, there will be an option in about:config to disable this, however, as of today, the Direct2D implementation is not complete, so judging it's performance today as opposed to in 3 months or 6 months, isn't really fair. =)

Comment 20

[d]

Well, this does, in that case, raise the question about if we should check the performance somehow. If it can decide that things generally render slower with the "acceleration" on a certain users computer, it will automatically switch to the classic rendering.

Comment 21

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

(In reply to comment #19)
> Bill, as far as I know, there will be an option in about:config to disable
> this, however, as of today, the Direct2D implementation is not complete, so
> judging it's performance today as opposed to in 3 months or 6 months, isn't
> really fair. =)

I fully realize that.  I was just hoping that if the situation does not improve for my configuration in the final product, I would still have the option of the old behavior.  I should also mention that the cases that are really painfully slow for me all involve the Adobe Flash Plug-in.  Perhaps this is a known issue?

Comment 22

[Brian Carpenter [:geeknik]]

Yes, issues with D2D & Flash are documented and there are open bugs for it and other performance issues. =)

Comment 23

[Bas Schouten (:bas.schouten)]

To answer Bill's questions:

We are aware of the windowless flash plugin performance issues. We actually have just discovered something we may be able to use to achieve considerable performance improvements here.

Furthermore, we realize for the foreseeable future there will be a considerable part of our userbase using hardware for which there could be performance regressions using Direct2D. For any initial 'switching on by default' we will define a 'whitelist' of hardware on which it will be switched on by default. On any hardware not on that list it will be disabled and classic GDI rendering will be used.

GDI rendering will not go away in the foreseeable future.

Comment 24

[Danial Horton]

Fwiw, i've not noticed any performance issues while using flash 10.1, maybe try running that if your gfx hardware is amongst those supporting it.

Comment 25

[cmtalbert]

(In reply to comment #20)
> Well, this does, in that case, raise the question about if we should check the
> performance somehow. If it can decide that things generally render slower with
> the "acceleration" on a certain users computer, it will automatically switch to
> the classic rendering.
We are working on a crowd-source testing add-on to help address this exact problem and to aid us with the hard data for building out the whitelist that Bas mentions in comment 23.

You can see some of the preliminary designs here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Auto-tools/Projects/Halreftest.  

We are doing a preliminary roll-out for testing of the extension next week.  If anyone on this bug would like to participate in that, please send me an email and I'll add you to the list (ctalbert at mozilla dot com).  Put "Halreftest" in the subject so I can easily see them in the deluge of email I get.  Thanks!

Comment 26

[Daniel Kirsch]

I suggest having a setting in the preferences dialog in the final release to make it easy for any user to enable/disable d2d. At least in the "advanced" settings. This way people can try to enable and try d2d even if their hardware is not on the whitelist or can disable it if their configuration causes problems.

Comment 27

[Wes Kocher (:KWierso) (Not reading bugmail; email directly if needed)]

From what I've seen, it seems like using the Restart button from the new addons manager will restart without D2D enabled, regardless of which extensions are enabled.

Manually shutting down and starting up Firefox with the same extensions enabled starts it with D2D working.

Is there already a bug for this? Anyone else see it?

Comment 28

[Leon Sorokin]

requesting Bug 574976 be added to the dependency list. 0_o

Comment 29

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Turned on in nightlies: http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/42545f8d4b10

Comment 30

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Should this bug be marked FIXED?

Comment 31

[Helder "Lthere" Magalhães]

(In reply to comment #30)
> Should this bug be marked FIXED?

IMHO, yes. Conceptually it is fixed.

Nevertheless, I'm guessing that, while this issue is being used as tracker bug (and I guess that it is, currently), that's a good reason not to mark it as fixed yet (visibility decreases considerably, as most searches/filters only return open bugs), so I'd vote for leaving it open: at least while the most important set of issues depends on aren't simply "forgotten". ;-)

Comment 32

[Matt Woodrow (:mattwoodrow)]

Closing this since Direct2D is enabled by default now.