If you've been following #servo lately, you'll see that we're starting a reboot of parallel layout right now (which I'm leading, more or less).
It just so happens that I'm also juggling a million other things simultaneously. For example, I'm working on power usage improvements on macOS that should help address some of the complaints upthread. Also there's the entirely new GPU font and SVG renderer (which is a novel technique). Also there's making sure WebRender ships. Etc.
Is any of this work coming to Mobile? I agree with the GP that this is where Firefox has the biggest opening, but it seems like there's very little investment in Firefox on Android.
I know it's probably really early to ask this, but do you have a rough estimate of when the power usage improvements will happen? Battery life is the main thing stopping me from using Firefox more, so I'm really looking forward to this being fixed.
I had a ~power related issue using Quantum. It "killed" my cpu (temp rising by 10s of degrees so fast I didn't have time to throttle before kernel thermal shutdown). I guess it's so parallel and so gpu intensive that my whole system goes into fever.
What? Your system doesn't handle running at max CPU and GPU usahe even for what I presume is seconds before thermal shutdown? That seems like an extremely serious issue with your system.
Clean your heatsink out, and also consider replacing the heatsink paste: that CPU is so old, its entirely possible a cheap thermal pad is no longer usable (commonly used on laptops and stock desktop HSFs).
I'm going to guess your problem is not CPU related, but rather a hardware issue relating to other hardware that Firefox uses (GPU, audio, …) Firefox spends most of its time idling in event loops; it's not a batch job like a compiler.
Note that I'm not blaming ffx, just witnessing something weird and wondering if it's due to using rust parallelism in ways not done through the usual cpp libs.
Very doubtful. The only thing I could think of that might conceivably cause similar symptoms would be AVX2, but none of our shipping Rust code uses that.
Odd then. I wasn't even using a specific webpage, just loading the previous session (~20tabs of average intensiveness). Chromium has the same kind of session and it never causes similar heat spikes. Anyway I'll try to reproduce it even though it's not pleasing to overheat like that.
It just so happens that I'm also juggling a million other things simultaneously. For example, I'm working on power usage improvements on macOS that should help address some of the complaints upthread. Also there's the entirely new GPU font and SVG renderer (which is a novel technique). Also there's making sure WebRender ships. Etc.