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Firefox 121 Now Available With Wayland Enabled By Default (phoronix.com) 47

Posted by BeauHD from the last-major-update-of-the-year dept.
Firefox 121 has arrived with Wayland support to be used by default on modern Linux desktops. Phoronix's Michael Larabel writes: Some Linux distributions and package builds have been using the native Wayland path for a while but now it's great to see the upstream builds make this default change as we get ready to embark on the 2024 Linux desktop. With my testing of Firefox 121 on Wayland, it's been working out well. X.Org/X11 support remains in place for those not using a Wayland-based desktop environment.

Firefox 121 also adds Voice Control command support on macOS, adds an option to always force-underline links within websites, Firefox now includes a floating button to help in creation within PDFs, various CSS feature additions, and other developer enhancements. Firefox 121 also now supports tail call elimination in WebAssembly for enhancing support for functional languages. You can download Firefox 121 via archive.mozilla.org.
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Firefox 121 Now Available With Wayland Enabled By Default More

Firefox 121 Now Available With Wayland Enabled By Default

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  • Firefox has a Wayland PIP bug (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xack ( 5304745 ) on Monday December 18, 2023 @07:20PM (#64090153)
    Mozilla even marks it as a known issue. Along with the fact that Wayland still has incomplete support for multi-window and still buggy in Virtualbox the forced adoption of Wayland in the next version of Fedora and possibly other distros in 2024 means we are going to have a crash landing with Wayland.

    • Re:Firefox has a Wayland PIP bug (Score:4, Informative)

      by slack_justyb ( 862874 ) on Monday December 18, 2023 @10:24PM (#64090367)

      Are we talking about AOT PiP issue with Firefox? If so, that's less a Wayland and more a GNOME issue. GNOME devs have indicated that they have no intention to support the layering needed to have out of box AOT PiP [gnome.org]. KDE has already submitted their own way of handling it, and hypothetically speaking, Firefox on KDE could go that route, but that would only work on KDE and that would add KDE specific code to Firefox mucking things up even more than they need to be.

      There's talk of adding PiP as protocol in Wayland [freedesktop.org] but you can read for yourself all the issues with doing that. One of the main points with Wayland is for Compositors to dictate what's best for users rather than the server dictate it. Once the server dictates the way things work, even if that way doesn't work for someone else, there's no going back. That's pretty much the issue with X11. Letting the Compositors dictate how PiP should work (should it allow input? should it appear in overviews? should it appear on every virtual desktop? etc) is a better option (IMHO) than having Wayland make the choices. It just sucks that GNOME has decided that Picture in Picture is an anti-feature and thus the energy to have something solid in place has just left Mozilla. Firefox and Wayland can totally do it and KDE provides a solid API for doing it, but if GNOME isn't also on board then there isn't much point considering that most folks use GNOME.

      In the mean time you can right mouse click and indicate always on top. In fact, the GNOME devs have indicated that's the way it should have always been. But your issue is mostly with the GNOME team at this point.

      • I'm still hoping we can have a PiN protocol in Wayland (Picture in Network). I'd like to ssh into computer A in country 1 and start an app, but get the window to show up in computer B in country 2.

        For example, when I'm on holiday in Bermuda I'd like to log into my home computer and start a media player to watch a movie, but actually watch it on the beach on my tablet while sipping a Mai Tai.

        • You are just asking for network forwarding. You can do that today with things like VNC or if you just want a single application used RDP RemoteApp function. If you are looking for ssh -X function there's waypipe being worked on. Wayland itself is attempting to avoid what is absolutely not needed by everyone for display, not everyone needs that kind of functionality and so it is up to compositors and/or extensions to implement it. There is more than just waypipe though that can do exactly what you want and i
          • I'm generally suspicious of UI infrastructure designers who make claims about what everyone needs. It leads to average one size fits all software.

            Consider the fashion industry. What if some designer/benevolent dictator for life decided that making clothes in all different sizes, and also separate clothes for men and women, was not efficient and only one single minimal product to fit everyone should exist? There are slightly more females than men in the US, so everybody should wear a dress optimized for a

            • it's not good for the central graphics rendering platform used by all to make stark choices that limit everyone and then makes independent developers jump through hoops to recreate the basics from scratch

              Network forwarding is not a feature that is used by a lot of people, point of fact. Few use an Android device for X/SSH forwarding, even fewer use their car's infotainment system to do X/SSH forwarding, even fewer ATM's use X/SSH forwarding, hardly any consumer uses X/SSH forwarding, even fewer Smart TVs, Smart HVAC systems, and so forth use X/SSH forwarding. Every one of these applications needs a display server in every use case. There are zero reasons to call it "jumping though hoops to recreate the b

    • Why run Fedora if you don't want bleeding edge? I mean, that bleeds. Stuff is always broken and that's a feature.

      I just took firefox-nightly for a spin on my Debian 12 box (kwin/wayland) and 4K YouTube plays much better than on firefox-esr on X11.

      Stable video without tearing or flickering.

      Pretty much as good as a $79 Bluray player. Good job, everybody.

    • A crash landing isn't necessarily a bad thing. Nothing gets bugs more attention than how wide spread the affected users are.

      But in any case the wonderful thing about Linux is that there are a variety of different distros to suit your tastes. If you are worried about bugs, then there's plenty of distros that take a more cautious approach to development and adoption of new defaults. Use one of them.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        A crash landing isn't necessarily a bad thing. Nothing gets bugs more attention than how wide spread the affected users are.

        And if enough FF bugs get duped to a Gnome bug, they'll either fix it or people who are sufficiently bothered by it will switch windowing managers, which is exactly as it should be.

  • All user services will soon point down the OSI layer stack to connect to different domains for support.

  • Now if it didn't ask me to set if as the default browser even more often than Edge!!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by theCoder ( 23772 )

      Or how about stop bugging me to always download a new version. Even if I don't have permission to install a new version or when it's running on a disconnected network and can't even detect what the current version is...

  • Ah, finally, the mainstream catching up to what some of us Linux aficionados have been tinkering with for ages. Wayland as default in Firefox 121 for modern Linux desktops feels like old news... It's about time, right? And those Voice Control features? Cute, but let's not pretend it's groundbreaking. WebAssembly optimizations? Meh, we've been expecting that for a while now. It's amusing how the masses are just catching up to our tech playground.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Play as much as you want in your systemd wayland node.js etc. playground but maybe the masses aren't interested at all in you sand box. Did you ever think of that?

      • > maybe the masses aren't interested at all in you sand box

        The masses don't care about windowing API's at all.

        They do want a secure clipboard, though.

        But please do tell us which distro is forcing you to use it and we'll get that straightened out right away.

        This is something up with which we shall not put.

        • Wayland's clipboard is not a single bit more secure than X11's, where did you get that idea from?

          Did someone try to explain the technical differences to you, you did not understand a bit, yet assumed that "they should know what they're talking about"? No, they don't, unfortunately. They simply assume that if something matches their assumptions ("intuition" LOL) it's certainly better.

          • On Wayland, only the application with keyboard focus gets informed about clipboard changes, and while KDE/GNOME still currently leak the clipboard contents to all X clients for X11 clipboard compatibility, once that layer is no longer needed, the clipboard will become secure by default for at least GNOME. The intention is that copy operations will be allowed for any app but that pasting will be denied except to the foreground app to ensure it cannot be used as a back channel to exfiltrate data, much like ho
          • This is nonsense.
            X11 allows any client to snoop the clipboard. In Wayland, the compositor decides who gets the message, and since it's the input layer, it will make correct decisions.
            Quit talking out of your ass.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 )

      Why does an application have any say over how the window manager operates?

      • Re:more meh (Score:4, Informative)

        by Zuriel ( 1760072 ) on Monday December 18, 2023 @09:28PM (#64090309)
        Firefox doesn't get to control the window manager, but it *does* need to know how to tell the window manager to draw a Firefox window.

        • Re:more meh (Score:5, Interesting)

          by techno-vampire ( 666512 ) on Tuesday December 19, 2023 @12:16AM (#64090435) Homepage
          And Firefox doesn't, or at least shouldn't get to decide what window managers it will work with. Remember, Gnome, Enlightenment and KDE are just about the only DEs that work with Wayland. Unless Firefox wants to abandon support for all the other Linux DEs it's going to have to continue support for X11.

          • Re: more meh (Score:4, Insightful)

            by slack_justyb ( 862874 ) on Tuesday December 19, 2023 @01:21AM (#64090465)
            XFCE is planning on heading to Wayland. The new DEs like Cosmic, Cinnamon, MATE, etc are going that way too. Additionally, with wlroots porting X window managers are easier because you do not need to worry about ICCCM stuff. XOrg is fine, but there is coming a day hardware is going to stop working on it. And with even the few maintainers left planning on leaving around 2032, the number of days XOrg has is getting less not getting more. It is an inevitability that eventually XOrg just will not run on hardware that the majority of people have because there will be no one to write drivers for it.
            • XFCE is planning on heading to Wayland.

              Oh, good! That's the DE I've been using since just before Gnome 3 came out. I've no objection to Wayland, and will probably switch to it when Xfce supports it, I just don't want X abandoned when there are large numbers of Linux users who still need it.

              • Yeah, XFCE is heading that way. They are basing off wlroots and actively staying away from libmutter. I don't blame them there. The GNOME devs have become actively hostile to outside influence, so libmutter should be considered a GNOME and GNOME-like only thing. Things wanting to go their own way will need to stay clear of any GNOME API, which will get harder to do come GTK 5. Additionally, they want xfdesktop and xfce4-panel to get broken up in this go round. It's been a goal, but now they've got a g

          • Unless Firefox wants to abandon support for all the other Linux DEs it's going to have to continue support for X11.

            All 50 people who care about that just screamed out in agony.

            • Believe it or not, Xfce and some of the other "lesser" DEs are actually quite popular, both because they're lightweight and because they let you do things your way rather than insist that however their devs like things is the One True Way. (Gnome is notorious for that.)

              • Believe it or not, Xfce and some of the other "lesser" DEs are actually quite popular

                All things being relative, from my perspective, no, they're not remotely significant minorities, coming in at under 8% (estimated by GoL stats, which admittedly aren't scientific- but they're the best we've got, and they're probably close to representative, since they're only going to represent the most hardcore linux users, and everyone else is- frankly- using Gnome)

                both because they're lightweight and because they let you do things your way rather than insist that however their devs like things is the One True Way. (Gnome is notorious for that.)

                Your subjective reasoning for disliking the major DEs doesn't matter one bit, because it's subjective. I'm not even saying it's wrong. You jus

  • It seems to me that open source is in the throws of birthing baby Wayland right now. The contractions started months ago. The water has now broken, and the big fat head of baby Wayland is starting to crown. It's probably going to be a slow and arduous birth, and will get more painful over the coming months as this thing gets pushed out. Everyone needs to collectively grit their teeth and squeeze hard.

    I think the pain will be worth it in the end - as a modern capable graphics system seems to be the one of
    • If all you want is a more capable graphics system under Linux, you don't need Wayland. All you need is Compiz [wikipedia.org], a compositing window manager with built in 3D support. On a computer built for recent versions of Windows, it can do things such as have four virtual desktops on a rotating 3D cube that you can move around so that you can see it as a cube, and even put an image on the top for such occasions. I won't say that Windows can't do things like that, but years after Compiz was released Windows still can

    • It seems to me that open source is in the throws of birthing baby Wayland right now.

      Dry a decade ago.

      I think the pain will be worth it in the end - as a modern capable graphics system seems to be the one of the ast cards in the Linux on Desktop "Exodia"

      Why? What do you think Wayland inherently provides?

  • Will it be one more thing for me to change in about:config, where they put every switch that would make Firefox blend in within KDE Plasma? By the way, anyone has a hint about making Firefox save PDFs that are meant just to be read in /tmp, like it was before?

    • Will it be one more thing for me to change in about:config

      I imagine the option will not be in about:config. How would Firefox render its about:config viewport if it doesn't know which protocol to use for rendering?

    • > By the way, anyone has a hint about making Firefox save PDFs that are meant just to be read in /tmp, like it was before?

      Try about:config -- download.start_downloads_in_tmp_dir

  • Kudos for User Accessibility (Score:3)

    by nmb3000 ( 741169 ) on Tuesday December 19, 2023 @01:12PM (#64091291) Journal

    adds an option to always force-underline links within websites

    Ya know, this is a small thing, but I'm very happy to see it. Ever since the trend of "make hyperlinks invisible" became the vogue of modern web design, I've found myself needing to create userstyles for a bunch of sites to make links easier to visually identify because seeing the difference between #888 text and #88a undecorated links is pretty much impossible. Especially when doing some quick browsing on a HTPC connected to a TV or when Flux's blue-light reduction is in effect, even Wikipedia's relatively blue links are hard to distinguish. Have people forgotten that hyperlinks form the backbone of the goddamned web?

    Other browsers can chase shit nobody cares about, like adding support for in-browser NFC-enabled webcams but it's nice to see Firefox still sometimes focusing on user needs and accessibility. Kudos.

  • Everyone says X.org is dying because there are no devs who know X11 anymore or are willing to learn. I simply don't believe you. This seems to be the whole crux of the Wayland debate. "Xorg is going away. You'd better accept any trash we choose to shovel your way. Oh, BTW, we are shitcanning XDMCP; so learn to love it." Fuck you people. I ain't buying it. Wayland has been around since 2012 and it's still not ready. That's a fact. I suspect this is much more a case of loud-but-not-hard-working developers wor

    • Then go maintain Xorg.

      > All my video cards work great with Xorg. [ ... ] Intel's old display drivers for the i810-based chips hasn't changed much and they are doing a great job of keeping it working with Xorg.

      Doing away with Xorg does away with one layer of drivers. xf86-video-radeon, xf86-input-libinput and others ring a bell? GLAMOR/XAA acceleration? All that can disappear.

      The people working on Wayland are a superset of the people currently maintaining Xorg. You suspect wrong.

  • Firefox support is waning. Last year, it was extremely rare to run into a site that would not work on Firefox. Now it is fairly common to find a commercial site that simply doesn't support it.

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