end of the road in sight for 10.9 & 10.10 ?

[RJVB]

Skimming through about:flags looking for a hook to disable the "open in app" button in the URL widget I saw an "experiment" to force the use of the Metal backend for the ANGLE whateveryoucallthat. It mentions that the OpenGL backend will soon be obsoleted on Mac.

Am I right this is going to mean the end of the road for 10.9 and 10.10 for which the Metal framework isn't available (AFAIK)? Or is that OpenGL backend so "well preserved" (a term from evolutionary sciences ;) ) that it shouldn't be overly hard to restore it after upstream have removed it from the source tree?

[Wowfunhappy]

I don't know what Bluebox will do in terms of reverting commits, but worst case scenario Chromium does not strictly need a graphics backend. Actually, until recently I was unknowingly running without OpenGL, because absent a specific command line flag it turns itself off if the rendering process crashes too many times, and the process was crashing due to #210. The difference is extremely noticeable in webapps which do significant graphics processing (which is why I started looking into what was going on), but I did not notice at all for casual browsing.

[RJVB]

In my experience it's often easier with (not even as) complex software as this to reintroduce removed things in some other way than by reverting the commits that removed them, but we'll leave that to the person(s) who (hopefully!) do the actual work.

The difference is extremely noticeable in webapps which do significant graphics processing but I did not notice at all for casual browsing.

Therein lies the catch, of course. More and more browsing is less and less casual than you may think, in terms of what's going on behind the scenes. And an OS without a browser capable of properly rendering the sites people visit is no longer really fit for everyday duty...

[Wowfunhappy]

To be clear, I only noticed when using Scratch (the children's programming language, I teach elementary school), and only then when I enabled the video sensing extension. Things were fine even in more complicated webapps like Google Maps. Had I tried to play a 3D game I definitely would have had problems, but I don't do that on a daily basis.

[RJVB]

Are you saying you didn't notice a difference on video-heavy sites?

[Wowfunhappy]

No, I didn't notice a difference, although my CPU is fast enough that video decoding in software is not typically a problem.

[RJVB]

No, I didn't notice a difference, although my CPU is fast enough that video decoding in software is not typically a problem.

There's decoding (and we know our old machines have hardware support for only a very limited number of codecs), but there's also the rendering step, which should still be more efficient if done with OpenGL primitives. And then there are all the fancy things modern websites do that clearly require compositing. Of course you can do all that in software, and if you're not doing anything else on your machine you might not notice too much of a performance hit. But performance hits are cumulative and websites will keep asking more resources. I don't know how much of an issue fan noise is for you, but my MBP gets really loud when the CPU is working, loud enough to bother not just me. No idea how much worse or better that would be under a newer OS X or reasonably modern Linux.

[ethanc8]

As of August, certain Metal-supporting devices are still using Chromium's OpenGL backend, so we have a few months: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/361577327. Additionally, we could gain more time by staying on M126, which will receive security patches for any issues affecting ChromeOS until May 2025 (as it is the current LTS version of ChromeOS).