The Mozilla Gfx team just announced in a blog post that starting from Firefox 94, they will introduce EGL backend and supporting graphics driver support on the Linux desktop client.It is reported that EGL can not only improve performance and reduce power consumption, but also bring other benefits. Previously, the Firefox development team preferred to enable GLX instead of EGL on Linux, but after a period of stability, Mozilla finally had a more full use to use it.
Firefox’s EGL support was originally enabled for the Android platform.
Mozilla pointed out that Firefox’s EGL code does not only benefit from the process improvements of OpenGL ES. Combined with Firefox’s DMA-BUF support, it has achieved more advantages including “zero-copy”.
In addition, there are continuous improvements supported by Wayland. As Wayland has become quite popular (and also uses EGL), the Firefox team has finally migrated its development efforts from GLX to GLX.
As for Firefox 94 coming this week, it will enable the EGL backend when running on Mesa 21.x (or newer) drivers.
Once Nvidia 495 series drivers are more widely adopted, Firefox EGL on its closed source drivers will also become the default setting.
In addition, only the NVIDIA 495 series driver, which has just been transferred to the beta version, contains the EGL_NV_robustness_video_memory_purge extension required by Firefox.
Using EGL on the Linux desktop, Firefox is expected to achieve better WebGL performance-because it supports refreshing part of the screen content (update / damage), reducing code errors, and default hardware video decoding, thereby reducing resources and energy costs.