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Firefox

Firefox Going To Ship With Wayland Enabled By Default (phoronix.com) 72

Posted by BeauHD from the year-of-Wayland dept.
Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: Guardrails have been in place where the Firefox browser has enabled Wayland by default (when running on recent GTK versions) but as of today that code has been removed... Firefox will try to move forward with stable releases where Wayland will ship by default! Mozilla Bug 1752398 to "ship the Wayland backend to release" has been closed this evening! After the ticket was open for the past two years, it's now deemed ready to hopefully ship enabled for Firefox 121!

This patch drops the "early beta or earlier" check to let Wayland support be enabled by default when running on recent GTK versions (GTK 3.24.30 threshold). Firefox 121 is due for release around 19 December and if all continues to hold, it will finally ship with the Wayland back-end enabled by default as another big step forward.
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Firefox Going To Ship With Wayland Enabled By Default More

Firefox Going To Ship With Wayland Enabled By Default

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  • Ass backwards (Score:5, Insightful)

    by flyingfsck ( 986395 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2023 @08:00PM (#64008429)
    IMHO Wayland is a step backward.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by sjames ( 1099 )

      It COULD have been good, but it's not. It could have been designed under a philosophy of use it as you see fut, but instead they chopped off anything that might facilitate that in order to better enforce OUR way(land) or the HIGHway.

      Instead of gaslighting everyone (There were actually claims made right here on /. that X could not support running apps remotely to display locally), they should have had a light bulb moment years ago when people said "what about running GUI apps remotely through a tunnel?". The

      • Re:Ass backwards (Score:5, Insightful)

        by martin-boundary ( 547041 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2023 @10:48PM (#64008713)
        X and ssh are arguably the killer apps of the linux ecosystem, aka "the network is the computer" paradigm pioneered by Sun. Replacing this backbone with Microsoft inspired designs is suicidal. It would set us back 50 years.

        • Re:Ass backwards (Score:4, Insightful)

          by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Thursday November 16, 2023 @12:12AM (#64008811)

          X and ssh are arguably the killer apps of the linux ecosystem, aka "the network is the computer"

          And Wayland is the killer app on a desktop PC. The vast majority of the world does not need nor even want a "network is the computer" philosophy. If you ever wonder why it's not the year of Linux on Desktop, your post is a great example of why.

          Nothing is being set back 50 years. If your use case is valid and popular it will be supported. Just that Wayland is not the project for you. Not every software is designed with *you specifically* in mind.

          • Re:Ass backwards (Score:5, Insightful)

            by sjames ( 1099 ) on Thursday November 16, 2023 @12:51AM (#64008885) Homepage Journal

            Wayland doesn't seem to do anything X hasn't been able to do for the last 30 years. How does 'me too" count as a killer app?

            • Wayland doesn't seem to do anything X hasn't been able to do for the last 30 years. How does 'me too" count as a killer app?

              That is you speaking out of pure ignorance, not any fault of Wayland. Even the earliest versions of Wayland prior to popular adoption by several distributions have provided functionality that X was not able to do due to architectural constraints.

              X is not perfect, far from it, pull your head out of your arse. Heck the fact X worked at all for many partially modern desktop use cases is a frigging miracle of ugly hacks.

              • Re: (Score:3)

                by sjames ( 1099 )

                I never said X was perfect. It could do with a pruning for sure.

                I note you didn't venture to name anything Wayland does that X doesn't.

          • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

            by nicubunu ( 242346 )

            And Wayland is the killer app on a desktop PC.

            I use Linux with X on my desktop for over 20 years already and I see nothing "killer" about Wayland, nothing in Wayland that I can't already do with X.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by jaywee ( 542660 )

            The vast majority of the world does not need nor even want a "network is the computer" philosophy.

            Umm.. the most used apps today are exactly that - remote webapps. Not really that big conceptual difference between streaming HTML/CSS/JS and streaming X11 commands.

            • Umm.. the most used apps today are exactly that - remote webapps. Not really that big conceptual difference between streaming HTML/CSS/JS and streaming X11 commands.

              No. The vast majority of apps are local. The fact that they depend on a network backend for service / content is an entirely different discussion. I can't magic this to Slashdot, I need to use a local app that does it.

          • And Wayland is the killer app on a desktop PC.

            Haha what? It's a piece of infrastructure. And one that in a number of ways worse that what it replaces and most importantly not better in the places where X is really deficient.

            How on earth is it the "killer app"? It adds basically nothing new.

            • It adds basically nothing new.

              The only thing that is not new is the ignorance of Slashdot posters. There's plenty of new things Wayland has been capable of for many years now. We've even talked about them on Slashdot yet here we are with you going out of your way to ignore them.

              Do a bit of reading up. The very first version of Wayland addressed what was already a deficiency in X. Or just sit there thinking you're right, and it's all the programmers and distribution maintainers who are moving over to Wayland for very real reasons who are

              • No it hasn't.

                As for "all" the distributions... Haha no. Pretty sure every distribution which uses xfce runs X for example.

                Even I'm not a massive enough nerd to think a windowing system is a killer app.

      • Re:Ass backwards (Score:5, Informative)

        by caseih ( 160668 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2023 @11:43PM (#64008771)

        I think you misunderstood the claims. The claim is, and it is correct, that modern apps don't actually use the remote parts of the X11 server anymore. Instead apps render everything including fonts locally and then just dump the bitmap across to the X server. So when you remote an app over ssh, when you take into account the asynchronous nature of X11 and the server round-trips, X over ssh is demonstrably worse than VNC or rdp in every way. In the olden days before we needed anti-aliased fonts and composite rendering with alpha channel, X11 apps could use the X server to draw the widgets, fonts, etc. It was quite efficient. I ran XEmacs over a modem and it was very usable. Can't do that with any modern X11 app.

        That said, Wayland never provided any mechanism for doing it better, but now we do have waypipe which will remote a wayland app over ssh and do it in a very efficient way using the rdp protocol.

        • Re:Ass backwards (Score:5, Insightful)

          by sjames ( 1099 ) on Thursday November 16, 2023 @01:28AM (#64008931) Homepage Journal

          What you say is true, but there was no mis-understanding. The people here and elsewhere knew EXACTLY what I was referring to and stated plainly that X couldn't do it. I even stated EXACTLY what I was doing step by step in script form and they never replied again. They use the most important remote part of X, the part where the application can be running remotely and display locally. It may not be all that nice these days over a modem, but who is using those anymore? It works just fine between my home and a corporate LAN on the other side of the country using modern networking.

          Waypipe is in the right direction, but note that it is not actually a part of the project at all, it's someone else's project. It would work a lot better if it was folded in to the spec and could support more than one app per session. Such that I could ssh in and type GUIapp1 & ; GUIapp2 & and still work in the shell with both apps displaying on my local display.

          The existence of Waypipe proves Wayland COULD have supported a remote protocol from the beginning.

          Wayland should have been a new version of X with the parts that haven't been used since the '90s deprecated and then relegated to a compatibility shim.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by vadim_t ( 324782 )

            The existence of Waypipe proves Wayland COULD have supported a remote protocol from the beginning.

            They explicitly didn't want to. Wayland communicates using shared memory and file handles, for optimal efficiency. What Waypipe does is interposing itself and encoding that stuff into a socket, and reconstructing the shared memory/file handle setup on the other end. That has performance costs, which is why Wayland doesn't do it that way.

            Waypipe is only 15K lines of C though. It's not that big of a deal to maint

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by sjames ( 1099 )

              It also wouldn't have been that big of a deal to include it in Wayland as a formally specified fallback for when shared memory won't work (remote).

              That would have made it feasible to use an environment variable to tell a Wayland app it needs to contact a tunnel rather than a local server. See the bit about running more than one app in a session. How does waypipe do when one GUI app launches another?

              • > How does waypipe do when one GUI app launches another?

                That could probably be "solved" with a LD_PRELOAD or bind mount hack ;-)

                It's quite depressing actually, because plan9 had solved all theese problems 30 years ago, and now Linux finally has usable namespaces, capablilities and all the stuff, yet they're only used for docker or other fake sandbox crap.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by sjames ( 1099 )

                  Possibly. It will likely take a bit more work to make that fly. It sounds pretty hackish compared to using a built in formally specified connection.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by vadim_t ( 324782 )

                It also wouldn't have been that big of a deal to include it in Wayland as a formally specified fallback for when shared memory won't work (remote).

                It absolutely would be a big deal. Wayland is a protocol specification. This would effectively double the size of it, saying it's mandatory to communicate both with shared memory and via sockets for every program that implements it. That's not really practical because you can imagine that a lot of programs would just skip the second part anyway, since nothing wou

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by sjames ( 1099 )

                  That's not really practical because you can imagine that a lot of programs would just skip the second part anyway, since nothing would break on a local desktop.

                  That's exactly why you want to include the remote protocol as a spec in the low level library. Few people if anyone will be wanting to re-implement that library anyway. The apps won't even need to be aware that there is more than one protocol. In fact, few apps will even care to directly call the low level library. That's what the mid levels like GTK and Qt are for.

                  With a good design, local vs. remote can be down to an implementation detail. It certainly shouldn't affect the API/ABI in any way.

                  This sort of

        • Well, if you use a modern app, you'll get a modern user experience. D'oh. Don't blame X for this. You can build modern on any platform.

      • It COULD have been good, but it's not. It could have been designed under a philosophy of use it as you see fut, but instead they chopped off anything that might facilitate that in order to better enforce OUR way(land) or the HIGHway.

        You can use it as you see fit. Why do you think your use case should be shoehorned in to somewhere where it doesn't belong? Wayland follows the unix philosophy of do one thing and do it well. Why do you want it to be like systemd and support every tiny edge case?

        Instead of gaslighting everyone

        They aren't gaslighting everyone, just a tiny subset of people. Most people don't give a shit about your GUI apps in a tunnel now needing to use a different protocol.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sjames ( 1099 )

          Since they seem to want world+dog to switch to it, they need to make world+dog actually want to.

          • Since they seem to want world+dog to switch to it, they need to make world+dog actually want to.

            Just wait long enough, and eventually the dog will need to modern.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by sjames ( 1099 )

              By that time, the dog will be old enough to know that when it says 'New and Improved', only the first one is much more likely to be true than the second.

              • Usually, a dog will need to modern every day. If you wait from puppy until it is grown up until you show it the street, it will have modernized your carpet or your floorboards many times.
                • Actually, I misspoke. Puppies need to modernize much more often, sometimes as much as five times a day or more.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by caseih ( 160668 )

      And yet for 99% of all users they won't even notice that it's Wayland and not X11, except that everything is a bit smoother and there's no tearing. You can even ssh to another computer and run a program, as X11 tunneling over ssh still works and Xwayland can fire up on-demand.

      The only issue I had with Wayland was that focus-follows mouse on KDE is really buggy. Part of that probably is wayland's fault as the devs don't believe in focus-follows mouse. But part of it was no doubt from bugs in kwin. Been a

    • IMHO Wayland is a step forwards. I suspect you and I have different use cases, with me expecting my desktop to function like a modern desktop, and you shouting at clouds and thinking the peak of computing excellence was drawing a graphical window over a telnet session.

      • You'll have to define what you mean by "function like a modern desktop". I use MATE as my desktop and it has a similar set of features compared with things like Windows 11.

  • Okay, so what will we notice? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2023 @08:48PM (#64008505) Journal

    For those of us not familiar with Wayland, what effects if any might people expect to see?

    I would think that (of course) they're shooting for a seamless experience, so smooth that most people won't even notice. That's probably not a realistic expectation, lol

    So, will the adverse effects be dependent on the different apps or is it more likely to be due to hardware incompatibilities, or ...?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      > what effects if any might people expect to see?

      crashes

    • Maybe you won't be able to shade Firefox windows anymore. That was my first thought. And I think I may not be wrong. Although the reason I couldn't shade windows was not Wayland, but some default config to ignore native title bar, now I am afraid there will be some incompatibility issues. Sure! Who wants to shade windows with double click, or stick them, or roll then with the scroll, or reduce their opacity? It's not the Windows(TM) way, so no-one cares.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Dwedit ( 232252 )

        Wow, I hear the word "shade" and immediately think of Pixel Shaders rather than the window management term where you shrink a window down to just a title bar.

      • I use Xfce, which doesn't work with Wayland, along with Compiz. Not only do I shade windows, they roll up like a window shade and back down with one click because I have a button to do that just to the left of the minimize button on the title bar.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by caseih ( 160668 )

          KDE can run as a wayland session and it can roll up windows, even on Wayland. It's a function of the window manager which is also the compositor on wayland.

          Gnome of course doesn't support such things because of the client-side decorations they love where they put everything in the window title bar and call it a HeaderBar.

          • That's good to know. My point was that if your DE can shade windows, it shouldn't matter if you're using X or Wayland, and I think you just proved me right. Back before Gnome 3 came out I came to believe that the Gnome devs were making the DE look and work the way they liked and anything that wasn't part of how they wanted it to work was rejected.

          • That's new to me. Last time I tryed, it didn't work, but that was some time ago.

        • Too bad Compiz is incompatible with Plasma now. I would give it a try now that I have a computer capable of supporting it again. I remember that the Compiz-Fusion developer were nicest ones. Once suggested that Compiz might be able to restore windows to their viewports from the previous session. This feature come incredibly fast, like in the next version.

    • Re:Okay, so what will we notice? (Score:4, Informative)

      by caseih ( 160668 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2023 @11:49PM (#64008785)

      Anyone running Fedora and Gnome has been using Wayland for years now, but when you ran Firefox, it would come up in an XWayland window. Now it will be a native Wayland window. You won't notice any difference, except that Firefox will probably scroll more smoothly and there won't be any tearing, which I do see on my X11 Mate Desktop session.

      I don't know if middle-click paste will work or not when Firefox runs as a wayland app.

      • I've seen the tearing thing a lot from the wayland people. I've been running firefox on X for a long time and I don't see tearing during scrolling.

        • I second this. And my hardware is over half a decade old, and was mediocre iGPU stuff when new. It's about to be deprecated since playing back a 4k video from my done should be doable on the PC with the big monitor...

          • Yep. I've got a bunch of machines. Regular laptop is an ancient machine with a dgpu running nouveau. Workshop machine is an less ancient machine with an AMD dgpu. Office machine is a Zen 2 with a 2080Ti, though I run firefox without GPU acceleration since it sucks if one of my networks is also taking up 100% of the GPU. So's machine is a Carbon X1 laptop with an iGPU.

            All run X. No tearing on any of them.

      • > Anyone running Fedora and Gnome has been using Wayland for years now

        Unless they have switched to "Gnome on X11" from the display manager when they couldn't stand the laggy pointer (and other inconsequential quirks) anymore.

        > I don't know if middle-click paste will work or not when Firefox runs as a wayland app.

        It does work OK on mutter (part of gnome-shell).

    • For those of us not familiar with Wayland, what effects if any might people expect to see?

      For 99.9% of people you will see nothing at all. Maybe Firefox rendering its window a bit smoother or able to see a fancy effect on a Wayland system.

      But I'm sure that means it's the end of the world here on Slashdot where Wayland is considered the apocalypse because it doesn't support using your modern browser remotely through a ssh session, or doesn't support (insert use case for the lusciously loud 0.1% here)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dargaud ( 518470 )
      When I tried it on Kubuntu, I didn't notice any difference at first. Then when I tried to launch remote windows, or to open a VNC session, it just didn't work. I think I had problems taking screenshots too. Never tried again.
      And I fail to see why an application like Firefox needs to be aware in what compositor it is being visualized.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        This was pretty much my experience and this was just a couple years ago. Basic stuff like screenshots was broken, and window management was glitch-y.

        That last one might not be Wayland's fault entirely but it does speak to the overall interface or lack of, being to simplistic and not really facilitating what the upper layers need. Might as well just create a bunch of virtual framebuffers at whatever requested size and tell apps and window managers good luck you're on your own.

        Sometimes simple is to simple.

  • It works fine, this change is to make it so you don't have to set MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 to ask it to launch as a Wayland native app instead of using Xwayland. For the majority of Wayland users, native Wayland Firefox works better than running it via Xwayland so this is an improvement.

    There should be no change for people who are running X11. The sensationalism in the comments is misguided! This has nothing to do with if Wayland is better or worse than X.

    • True, but that's boring. Some of us think the very existence of Wayland is an abomination and would prefer to argue about that.

  • Any estimation of % of software supporting Wayland natively?
    It seems meaningless to me to migrate to Wayland, and find that 70% of the applications use XWayland, and the remaining 30% support both X11 and Wayland.

  • Wayland sucks! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Period!

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