« After years of development, we will launch WebGpu on Windows in Firefox 141! “Exclaimed the Mozilla GFX team yesterday. This API, which takes over from webgl, provides much more direct access to the capabilities of GPUs. The key, significant improvements in performance, both on graphic calculations and on others linked to AI, including inference.
Graphic millefeuille
This programming interface is the result of a joint effort within the W3C and bringing together companies like Mozilla, Apple, Intel and Microsoft, the whole being widely towed by Google. The objective was to give browsers more modern access to equipment, in the wake of low level APIs that appeared on the different platforms. WebGpu depends on the latter, by providing a lot of capacity, according to its implementation of course.
The whole is not so simple. On any platform, we thus find the pilot responsible for the operation of the GPU. It is up to him to expose the instructions to the chip. Above, the native graphic API (Vulkan on Linux for example) is another essential brick. In an operating system, it exposes capacities, in which applications will pick. Then comes WebGpu in the browser or, more specifically, its implementation. It is she who will create logical devices (software) for each application by needing.
If you use Chrome or a Chromium -based browser, you can already observe the possibilities of webgpu via the dedicated site. Chrome has been providing this capacity for two years. Why all this time at Mozilla? We don’t know exactly, but Google has devoted more means to it, the web platform representing the heart of its activities. Apple, although having participated in the development of the API, will only integrate it in Safari 26 this fall.
There remains “a lot of work”
According to Mozilla, WebGpu is an API ” vast and complex ». The effects were concentrated quite logically on the most obvious functions, in order to ” that high -visibility webgpu applications and demonstrations without problem ». According to Mozilla, everything should be fine in most cases.
The team also explains that it remains ” a lot of work », Both on performance and compliance with specification. For example, the browser uses inter-processes without a buffer to transmit requests to the GPU sandbox. This problem has already been corrected, but the solution will only be deployed in Firefox 142, with significant performance gains.
In addition, the browser does not have a modern way to know when a GPU has finished an operation and introduces intervals to check, which leads to latencies. The developers are currently looking at the problem and explore various solutions. Likewise, Firefox does not yet support the importing method of webgpu, which allows the GPU for the video reading decompressed directly from the decoder.
Windows first, the others by the end of the year
Webppu support will only be available for Windows when Firefox 141 will be available on July 22. A question of priority for Mozilla: this is where the overwhelming majority of users are. The team specifies, however, that Mac and Linux versions are planned ” in the coming months And that it is possible to test them in the Nightly channel of the browser. The support will also be extended to Android.
Finally, Mozilla indicates that the implementation of webppu in Firefox is based on WGPU, an independent project and written in Rust. It provides a unified interface to expose the underlying capacities of low level APIs depending on the platform used: Direct3D 12 on Windows, Metal on MacOS and Vulkan on Linux. Mozilla actively contributes to the project, evokes a very lively community and invites those interested to look at WGPU to participate in its development.