Mozilla Firefox

Bug #32561
Comment #119

Comment 119 for bug 32561

Revision history for this message

In Mozilla Bugzilla #334064, Mozilla-behdad (mozilla-behdad) wrote on 2006-09-12:

#119

(In reply to comment #35)
> (In reply to comment #34)
> > I would argue that by the time that Firefox want so ship with pangocairo, FC5
> > is not such a huge requirement. Earlier Fedora versions don't have cairo
> > either afterall. I know mozilla currently has its own cairo copy, but isn't
> > the plan to remove that and use upstream when all the patches are merged
> > (almost there)?
> >
> afaik, the plan is for us to ship our own version of cairo with our builds.
> What upstream distributors do is up to them and the Firefox trademark
> guidelines.
>
> > ... ligature stuff ...
> While having support for ligatures from pango would be nice, we simply can't
> take a 500% slowdown for them. We want to special case any non-complex text to
> avoid pango entirely because it is so slow for so little gains.

I appreciate it if you point me to benchmarks such that I can reproduce the 500%. The Pango-based Firefox shipped in Fedora is definitely not 500% slower. Not from benchmarks I've seen. There's the fontset caching problem, but that's been improved and I'm still working on it. And like Robert pointed, the pango backend in Firefox 1.5 is doing really bad things with Pango.

(In reply to comment #36)
> > I would argue that by the time that Firefox want so ship with pangocairo
>
> This would be in 6 months, right? And all developers would need to have such
> machines right now?

Is it? http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap.html says "Q1 2007?", but then the same page also says "2 late Q2/early Q3 2006 Final Release". Do you expect me to believe that page?

> > FC5 is not such a huge requirement.
>
> Ah. You're one of those people who're so common in the Linux distro world who
> assumes everyone upgrades their OS as soon as the next version comes out.

I'm not. I'm just a developer. If you expect someone like me to fetch and compile the developmental Firefox versions (which takes a one or two gigs) to test and optimize it, why can't Firefox developers install a three tiny libraries that are glib, cairo, and pango?

> Sorry, but that's just not the case. There's no way we can ship in 6 months
> requiring FC5, imho.

You can ship with internal copies of glib and pango and gtk+.

> > This means, the Xft measurements don't take into account things like
> > ligatures
>
> For what it's worth, last time I profiled the pango measurement path (just the
> measurement) was about 120 times slower than the Xft path. This is on FC4
> here, with PangoXft.

That's such a bold statement. Do you have any benchmarks? I'm very interested in checking them out.

> Pageload performace was 400% slower with pango than
> without. I clearly can't test PangoCairo because I'd need to upgrade my OS
> first.

If you, a developer, need to upgrade your OS first to get a non-ancient Pango, why do you think all your users install Firefox on ancient operating systems?

> > So, what should I do? Open a bug "please use pangocairo"?
>
> Get pangocairo backported into pango versions that are actually shipped to an
> overwhelming majority of Linux users so we don't have to give people the "to
> use our browser you MUST update your operating system" crap that will make them
> simply not use our browser?

Suppose that I backported pangocairo to work with pango-1.8. How are your users going to get that pangocairo library? Included in firefox? Then why not include pango too?

(In reply to comment #35)
> (In reply to comment #34)
> > I would argue that by the time that Firefox want so ship with pangocairo, FC5
> > is not such a huge requirement.  Earlier Fedora versions don't have cairo
> > either afterall.  I know mozilla currently has its own cairo copy, but isn't
> > the plan to remove that and use upstream when all the patches are merged
> > (almost there)?
> > 
> afaik, the plan is for us to ship our own version of cairo with our builds. 
> What upstream distributors do is up to them and the Firefox trademark
> guidelines.
> 
> > ... ligature stuff ...
> While having support for ligatures from pango would be nice, we simply can't
> take a 500% slowdown for them.  We want to special case any non-complex text to
> avoid pango entirely because it is so slow for so little gains.

I appreciate it if you point me to benchmarks such that I can reproduce the 500%.  The Pango-based Firefox shipped in Fedora is definitely not 500% slower.  Not from benchmarks I've seen.  There's the fontset caching problem, but that's been improved and I'm still working on it.  And like Robert pointed, the pango backend in Firefox 1.5 is doing really bad things with Pango.

(In reply to comment #36)
> > I would argue that by the time that Firefox want so ship with pangocairo
> 
> This would be in 6 months, right?  And all developers would need to have such
> machines right now?

Is it?  http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap.html says "Q1 2007?", but then the same page also says "2  	 	late Q2/early Q3 2006  	Final Release".  Do you expect me to believe that page?

> > FC5 is not such a huge requirement. 
> 
> Ah.  You're one of those people who're so common in the Linux distro world who
> assumes everyone upgrades their OS as soon as the next version comes out.

I'm not.  I'm just a developer.  If you expect someone like me to fetch and compile the developmental Firefox versions (which takes a one or two gigs) to test and optimize it, why can't Firefox developers install a three tiny libraries that are glib, cairo, and pango?

> Sorry, but that's just not the case.  There's no way we can ship in 6 months
> requiring FC5, imho.

You can ship with internal copies of glib and pango and gtk+.

> > This means, the Xft measurements don't take into account things like
> > ligatures
> 
> For what it's worth, last time I profiled the pango measurement path (just the
> measurement) was about 120 times slower than the Xft path.  This is on FC4
> here, with PangoXft.

That's such a bold statement.  Do you have any benchmarks?  I'm very interested in checking them out.

> Pageload performace was 400% slower with pango than
> without.  I clearly can't test PangoCairo because I'd need to upgrade my OS
> first.

If you, a developer, need to upgrade your OS first to get a non-ancient Pango, why do you think all your users install Firefox on ancient operating systems?

> > So, what should I do?  Open a bug "please use pangocairo"?
> 
> Get pangocairo backported into pango versions that are actually shipped to an
> overwhelming majority of Linux users so we don't have to give people the "to
> use our browser you MUST update your operating system" crap that will make them
> simply not use our browser?

Suppose that I backported pangocairo to work with pango-1.8.  How are your users going to get that pangocairo library?  Included in firefox?  Then why not include pango too?