OffscreenCanvas update

Hold up, a blog post before a year’s up? I’d best slow down, don’t want to over-strain myself 🙂 So, a year ago, OffscreenCanvas was starting to become usable but was missing some key features, such as asynchronous updates and text-related functions. I’m pleased to say that, at least for Linux, it’s been complete for quite a while now! It’s still going to be a while, I think, before this is a truly usable feature in every browser. Gecko support is still forthcoming, support for non-Linux WebKit is still off by default and I find it can be a little unstable in Chrome… But the potential is huge, and there are now double the number of independent, mostly-complete implementations that prove it’s a workable concept.

Something I find I’m guilty of, and I think that a lot of systems programmers tend to be guilty of, is working on a feature but not using that feature. With that in mind, I’ve been spending some time in the last couple of weeks to try and bring together demos and information on the various features that the WebKit team at Igalia has been working on. With that in mind, I’ve written a little OffscreenCanvas demo. It should work in any browser, but is a bit pointless if you don’t have OffscreenCanvas, so maybe spin up Chrome or a canary build of Epiphany.

OffscreenCanvas fractal renderer demo, running in GNOME Web Canary

Those of us old-skool computer types probably remember running fractal renderers back on their old home computers, whatever they may have been (PC for me, but I’ve seen similar demos on Amigas, C64s, Amstrad CPCs, etc.) They would take minutes to render a whole screen. Of course, with today’s computing power, they are much faster to render, but they still aren’t cheap by any stretch of the imagination. We’re talking 100s of millions of operations to render a full-HD frame. Running on the CPU on a single thread, this is still something that isn’t really real-time, at least implemented naively in JavaScript. This makes it a nice demonstration of what OffscreenCanvas, and really, Worker threads allow you to do without too much fuss.

The demo, for which you can look at my awful code, splits that rendering into 64 tiles and gives each tile to the first available Worker in a pool of rendering threads (different parts of the fractal are much more expensive to render than others, so it makes sense to use a work queue, rather than just shoot them all off distributed evenly amongst however many Workers you’re using). Toggle one of the animation options (palette cycling looks nice) and you’ll get a frame-rate counter in the top-right, where you can see the impact on performance that adding Workers can have. In Chrome, I can hit 60fps on this 40-core Xeon machine, rendering at 1080p. Just using a single worker, I barely reach 1fps (my frame-rates aren’t quite as good in WebKit, I expect because of some extra copying – there are some low-hanging fruit around OffscreenCanvas/ImageBitmap and serialisation when it comes to optimisation). If you don’t have an OffscreenCanvas-capable browser (or a monster PC), I’ve recorded a little demonstration too.

The important thing in this demo is not so much that we can render fractals fast (this is probably much, much faster to do using WebGL and shaders), but how easy it is to massively speed up a naive implementation with relatively little thought. Google Maps is great, but even on this machine I can get it to occasionally chug and hitch – OffscreenCanvas would allow this to be entirely fluid with no hitches. This becomes even more important on less powerful machines. It’s a neat technology and one I’m pleased to have had the opportunity to work on. I look forward to seeing it used in the wild in the future.

OffscreenCanvas, jobs, life

Hoo boy, it’s been a long time since I last blogged… About 2 and a half years! So, what’s been happening in that time? This will be a long one, so if you’re only interested in a part of it (and who could blame you), I’ve titled each section.

Leaving Impossible

Well, unfortunately my work with Impossible ended, as we essentially ran out of funding. That’s really a shame, we worked on some really cool, open-source stuff, and we’ve definitely seen similar innovations in the field since we stopped working on it. We took a short break (during which we also, unsuccessfully, searched for further funding), after which Rob started working on a cool, related project of his own that you should check out, and I, being a bit less brave, starting seeking out a new job. I did consider becoming a full-time musician, but business wasn’t picking up as quickly as I’d hoped it might in that down-time, and with hindsight, I’m glad I didn’t (Covid-19 and all).

I interviewed with a few places, which was certainly an eye-opening experience. The last ‘real’ job interview I did was for Mozilla in 2011, which consisted mainly of talking with engineers that worked there, and working through a few whiteboard problems. Being a young, eager coder at the time, this didn’t really phase me back then. Turns out either the questions have evolved or I’m just not quite as sharp as I used to be in that very particular environment. The one interview I had that involved whiteboard coding was a very mixed bag. It seemed a mix of two types of questions; those that are easy to answer (but unless you’re in the habit of writing very quickly on a whiteboard, slow to write down) and those that were pretty impossible to answer without specific preparation. Perhaps this was the fault of recruiters, but you might hope that interviews would be catered somewhat to the person you’re interviewing, or the work they might actually be doing, neither of which seemed to be the case? Unsurprisingly, I didn’t get past that interview, but in retrospect I’m also glad I didn’t. Igalia’s interview process was much more humane, and involved mostly discussions about actual work I’ve done, hypothetical situations and ethics. They were very long discussions, mind, but I’m very glad that they were happy to hire me, and that I didn’t entertain different possibilities. If you aren’t already familiar with Igalia, I’d highly recommend having a read about them/us. I’ve been there a year now, and the feeling is quite similar to when I first joined Mozilla, but I believe with Igalia’s structure, this is likely to stay a happier and safer environment. Not that I mean to knock Mozilla, especially now, but anyone that has worked there will likely admit that along with the giddy highs, there are also some unfortunate lows.

Igalia

I joined Igalia as part of the team that works on WebKit, and that’s what I’ve been doing since. It almost makes perfect sense in a way. Surprisingly, although I’ve spent overwhelmingly more time on Gecko, I did actually work with WebKit first while at OpenedHand, and for a short period at Intel. While celebrating my first commit to WebKit, I did actually discover it wasn’t my first commit at all, but I’d contributed a small embedding-related fix-up in 2008. So it’s nice to have come full-circle! My first work at Igalia was fixing up some patches that Žan DoberÅ¡ek had prototyped to allow direct display of YUV video data via pixel shaders. Later on, I was also pleased to extend that work somewhat by fixing some vc3 driver bugs and GStreamer bugs, to allow for hardware decoding of YUV video on Raspberry Pi 3b (this, I believe, is all upstream at this point). WebKit Gtk and WPE WebKit may be the only Linux browser backends that leverage this pipeline, allowing for 1080p30 video playback on a Pi3b. There are other issues making this less useful than you might think, but either way, it’s a nice first achievement.

OffscreenCanvas

After that introduction, I was pointed at what could be fairly described as my main project, OffscreenCanvas. This was also a continuation of Žan’s work (he’s prolific!), though there has been significant original work since. This might be the part of this post that people find most interesting or relevant, but having not blogged in over 2 years, I can’t be blamed for waffling just a little. OffscreenCanvas is a relatively new web standard that allows the use of canvas API disconnected from the DOM, and within Workers. It also makes some provisions for asynchronously updated rendering, allowing canvas updates in Workers to bypass the main thread entirely and thus not be blocked by long-running processes on that thread. The most obvious use-case for this, and I think the most practical, is essentially non-blocking rendering of generated content. This is extremely handy for maps, for example. There are some other nice use-cases for this as well – you can, for example, show loading indicators that don’t stop animating while performing complex DOM manipulation, or procedurally generate textures for games, asynchronously. Any situation where you might want to do some long-running image processing without blocking the main thread (image editing also springs to mind).

Currently, the only complete implementation is within Blink. Gecko has a partial implementation that only supports WebGL contexts (and last time I tried, crashed the browser on creation…), but as far as I know, that’s it. I’ve been working on this, with encouragement and cooperation from Apple, on and off for the past year. In fact, as of August 12th, it’s even partially usable, though there is still a fair bit missing. I’ve been concentrating on the 2d context use-case, as I think it’s by far the most useful part of the standard. It’s at the point where it’s mostly usable, minus text rendering and minus some edge-case colour parsing. Asynchronous updates are also not yet supported, though I believe that’s fairly close for Linux. OffscreenCanvas is enabled with experimental features, for those that want to try it out.

My next goal, after asynchronous updates on Linux, is to enable WebGL context support. I believe these aren’t particularly tough goals, given where it is now, so hopefully they’ll happen by the end of the year. Text rendering is a much harder problem, but I hope that between us at Igalia and the excellent engineers at Apple, we can come up with a plan for it. The difficulty is that both styling and font loading/caching were written with the assumption that they’d run on just one thread, and that that thread would be the main thread. A very reasonable assumption in a pre-Worker and pre-many-core-CPU world of course, but increasingly less so now, and very awkward for this particular piece of work. Hopefully we’ll persevere though, this is a pretty cool technology, and I’d love to contribute to it being feasible to use widely, and lessen the gap between native and the web.

And that’s it from me. Lots of non-work related stuff has happened in the time since I last posted, but I’m keeping this post tech-related. If you want to hear more of my nonsense, I tend to post on Twitter a bit more often these days. See you in another couple of years 🙂

Web Navigation Transitions

Wow, so it’s been over a year since I last blogged. Lots has happened in that time, but I suppose that’s a subject for another post. I’d like to write a bit about something I’ve been working on for the last week or so. You may have seen Google’s proposal for navigation transitions, and if not, I suggest reading the spec and watching the demonstration. This is something that I’ve thought about for a while previously, but never put into words. After reading Google’s proposal, I fear that it’s quite complex both to implement and to author, so this pushed me both to document my idea, and to implement a proof-of-concept.

I think Google’s proposal is based on Android’s Activity Transitions, and due to Android UI’s very different display model, I don’t think this maps well to the web. Just my opinion though, and I’d be interested in hearing peoples’ thoughts. What follows is my alternative proposal. If you like, you can just jump straight to a demo, or view the source. Note that the demo currently only works in Gecko-based browsers – this is mostly because I suck, but also because other browsers have slightly inscrutable behaviour when it comes to adding stylesheets to a document. This is likely fixable, patches are most welcome.


 Navigation Transitions specification proposal

Abstract

An API will be suggested that will allow transitions to be performed between page navigations, requiring only CSS. It is intended for the API to be flexible enough to allow for animations on different pages to be performed in synchronisation, and for particular transition state to be selected on without it being necessary to interject with JavaScript.

Proposed API

Navigation transitions will be specified within a specialised stylesheet. These stylesheets will be included in the document as new link rel types. Transitions can be specified for entering and exiting the document. When the document is ready to transition, these stylesheets will be applied for the specified duration, after which they will stop applying.

Example syntax:

When navigating to a new page, the current page’s ‘transition-exit‘ stylesheet will be referenced, and the new page’s ‘transition-enter‘ stylesheet will be referenced.

When navigation is operating in a backwards direction, by the user pressing the back button in browser chrome, or when initiated from JavaScript via manipulation of the location or history objects, animations will be run in reverse. That is, the current page’s ‘transition-enter‘ stylesheet will be referenced, and animations will run in reverse, and the old page’s ‘transition-exit‘ stylesheet will be referenced, and those animations also run in reverse.

[Update]

Anne van Kesteren suggests that forcing this to be a separate stylesheet and putting the duration information in the tag is not desirable, and that it would be nicer to expose this as a media query, with the duration information available in an @-rule. Something like this:

I think this would indeed be nicer, though I think the exact naming might need some work.

Transitioning

When a navigation is initiated, the old page will stay at its current position and the new page will be overlaid over the old page, but hidden. Once the new page has finished loading it will be unhidden, the old page’s ‘transition-exit‘ stylesheet will be applied and the new page’s ‘transition-enter’ stylesheet will be applied, for the specified durations of each stylesheet.

When navigating backwards, the CSS animations timeline will be reversed. This will have the effect of modifying the meaning of animation-direction like so:

and this will also alter the start time of the animation, depending on the declared total duration of the transition. For example, if a navigation stylesheet is declared to last 0.5s and an animation has a duration of 0.25s, when navigating backwards, that animation will effectively have an animation-delay of 0.25s and run in reverse. Similarly, if it already had an animation-delay of 0.1s, the animation-delay going backwards would become 0.15s, to reflect the time when the animation would have ended.

Layer ordering will also be reversed when navigating backwards, that is, the page being navigated from will appear on top of the page being navigated backwards to.

Signals

When a transition starts, a ‘navigation-transition-startNavigationTransitionEvent will be fired on the destination page. When this event is fired, the document will have had the applicable stylesheet applied and it will be visible, but will not yet have been painted on the screen since the stylesheet was applied. When the navigation transition duration is met, a ‘navigation-transition-end‘ will be fired on the destination page. These signals can be used, amongst other things, to tidy up state and to initialise state. They can also be used to modify the DOM before the transition begins, allowing for customising the transition based on request data.

JavaScript execution could potentially cause a navigation transition to run indefinitely, it is left to the user agent’s general purpose JavaScript hang detection to mitigate this circumstance.

Considerations and limitations

Navigation transitions will not be applied if the new page does not finish loading within 1.5 seconds of its first paint. This can be mitigated by pre-loading documents, or by the use of service workers.

Stylesheet application duration will be timed from the first render after the stylesheets are applied. This should either synchronise exactly with CSS animation/transition timing, or it should be longer, but it should never be shorter.

Authors should be aware that using transitions will temporarily increase the memory footprint of their application during transitions. This can be mitigated by clear separation of UI and data, and/or by using JavaScript to manipulate the document and state when navigating to avoid keeping unused resources alive.

Navigation transitions will only be applied if both the navigating document has an exit transition and the target document has an enter transition. Similarly, when navigating backwards, the navigating document must have an enter transition and the target document must have an exit transition. Both documents must be on the same origin, or transitions will not apply. The exception to these rules is the first document load of the navigator. In this case, the enter transition will apply if all prior considerations are met.

Default transitions

It is possible for the user agent to specify default transitions, so that navigation within a particular origin will always include navigation transitions unless they are explicitly disabled by that origin. This can be done by specifying navigation transition stylesheets with no href attribute, or that have an empty href attribute.

Note that specifying default transitions in all situations may not be desirable due to the differing loading characteristics of pages on the web at large.

It is suggested that default transition stylesheets may be specified by extending the iframe element with custom ‘default-transition-enter‘ and ‘default-transition-exit‘ attributes.

Examples

Simple slide between two pages:

[page-1.html]

[page-1-exit.css]

[page-2.html]

[page-2-enter.css]


I believe that this proposal is easier to understand and use for simpler transitions than Google’s, however it becomes harder to express animations where one element is transitioning to a new position/size in a new page, and it’s also impossible to interleave contents between the two pages (as the pages will always draw separately, in the predefined order). I don’t believe this last limitation is a big issue, however, and I don’t think the cognitive load required to craft such a transition is considerably higher. In fact, you can see it demonstrated by visiting this link in a Gecko-based browser (recommended viewing in responsive design mode Ctrl+Shift+m).

I would love to hear peoples’ thoughts on this. Am I actually just totally wrong, and Google’s proposal is superior? Are there huge limitations in this proposal that I’ve not considered? Are there security implications I’ve not considered? It’s highly likely that parts of all of these are true and I’d love to hear why. You can view the source for the examples in your browser’s developer tools, but if you’d like a way to check it out more easily and suggest changes, you can also view the git source repository.

Linking CSS properties with scroll position: A proposal

As I, and many others have written before, on mobile, rendering/processing of JS is done asynchronously to responding to the user scrolling, so that we can maintain touch response and screen update. We basically have no chance of consistently hitting 60fps if we don’t do this (and you can witness what happens if you don’t by running desktop Firefox (for now)). This does mean, however, that you end up with bugs like this, where people respond in JavaScript to the scroll position changing and end up with jerky animation because there are no guarantees about the frequency or timeliness of scroll position updates. It also means that neat parallax sites like this can’t be done in quite the same way on mobile. Although this is currently only a problem on mobile, this will eventually affect desktop too. I believe that Internet Explorer already uses asynchronous composition on the desktop, and I think that’s the way we’re going in Firefox too. It’d be great to have a solution for this problem first.

It’s obvious that we could do with a way of declaring a link between a CSS property and the scroll position. My immediate thought is to do this via CSS. I had this idea for a syntax:

This would work quite similarly to standard transitions, where a limited number of properties would be supported, and perhaps their interpolation could be defined in the same way too. Relative scroll position is 0px when the scroll position of the particular axis matches the element’s offset position. This would lead to declarations like this:

This would define a transition that would grow and fade in an element as the user scrolled it towards 100px down the page, then shrink and fade out as you scrolled beyond that point.

But then Paul Rouget made me aware that Anthony Ricaud had the same idea, but instead of this slightly arcane syntax, to tie it to CSS animation keyframes. I think this is more easily implemented (at least in Firefox’s case), more flexible and more easily expressed by designers too. Much like transitions and animations, these need not be mutually exclusive though, I suppose (though the interactions between them might mean as a platform developer, it’d be in my best interests to suggest that they should :)).

I’m not aware of any proposal of this suggestion, so I’ll describe the syntax that I would expect. I think it should inherit from the CSS animation spec, but prefix the animation-* properties with scroll-. Instead of animation-duration, you would have scroll-animation-bounds. scroll-animation-bounds would describe a vector, the distance along which would determine the position of the animation. Imagine that this vector was actually a plane, that extended infinitely, perpendicular to its direction of travel; your distance along the vector is unaffected by your distance to the vector. In other words, if you had a scroll-animation-bounds that described a line going straight down, your horizontal scroll position wouldn’t affect the animation. Animation keyframes would be defined in the exact same way.

[Edit] Paul Rouget makes the suggestion that rather than having a prefixed copy of animation, that a new property be introduced, animation-controller, of which the default would be time, but a new option could be scroll. We would still need an equivalent to duration, so I would re-purpose my above-suggested property as animation-scroll-bounds.

What do people think about either of these suggestions? I’d love to hear some conversation/suggestions/criticisms in the comments, after which perhaps I can submit a revised proposal and begin an implementation.