Firefox Wayland By Default Diverted To Fedora 31

[Kayote]

just asking wouldn't porting firefox to qt solve this issue?

[smitty3268]

just asking wouldn't porting firefox to qt solve this issue?

Not really, no. I mean, if you ported all the instances of the x api over, then sure - but that's probably at least as difficult as just porting straight to wayland from the start, if not more so.

[shmerl]

just asking wouldn't porting firefox to qt solve this issue?

It would make things better overall. GTK is just a mess. That's not Wayland specific. I suppose Firefox developers are so insistent on using GTK and even let already existing Qt Firefox branch die out, due to RedHat being heavy backers of Gnome and one of the major sponsors of Firefox Linux development. Since they are focused on GTK, Firefox tags along

Overall progress of Firefox on Linux feels quite slow. For instance hardware accelerated video encoding / decoding is missing for years and nobody seems to be working on it. This makes for example using Firefox with WebRTC on weaker laptops close to impossible due to CPU bottlenecking. I'm saying it as a long time Firefox user who doesn't use Chromium.

[finalzone]

from Thunderbird68 an firtefox68 will all have much better support for Wayland. current ESR of TB is Crap

Using Thunderbird-Wayland and Firefox-Wayland on daily basis with default setting. Only issue is when enabling OpenGL compositing on some systems. So far, both Thunderbird and Firefox on Wayland run smoothly on AMD Ryzen 2500u using latest stable amdgpu driver.

Compositing    OpenGL
GPU #1
Active    Yes
Description    X.Org -- AMD RAVEN (DRM 3.27.0, 4.20.15-200.fc29.x86_64, LLVM 7.0.1)
Vendor ID    X.Org
Device ID    AMD RAVEN (DRM 3.27.0, 4.20.15-200.fc29.x86_64, LLVM 7.0.1)
Driver Version    4.5 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 18.3.4

[caligula]

It would make things better overall. GTK is just a mess. That's not Wayland specific. I suppose Firefox developers are so insistent on using GTK and even let already existing Qt Firefox branch die out, due to RedHat being heavy backers of Gnome and one of the major sponsors of Firefox Linux development. Since they are focused on GTK, Firefox tags along

Overall progress of Firefox on Linux feels quite slow.

Adopting GTK 3+ seems to take long for other projects too. For example XFCE announced GTK3 plans around 4 years ago. XFCE's a rather minimal DE which shouldn't take too long.

In fact if you compare the screenshot from 2018 here
- https://i0.wp.com/fosspost.org/wp-co...50%2C392&ssl=1
and
- https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.14/roadmap

you'll see that xfce4-session has regressed backwards. From 100% to 99%. No progress on xfwm4 in over a year.

Also GTK3 GIMP is still WIP even though GIMP started the whole GTK. GIMP developers have probably the best knowledge of GTK on this planet. So how can it take so long?

For instance hardware accelerated video encoding / decoding is missing for years and nobody seems to be working on it. This makes for example using Firefox with WebRTC on weaker laptops close to impossible due to CPU bottlenecking. I'm saying it as a long time Firefox user who doesn't use Chromium.

Isn't that related to Wayland? It's not possible to optimize the video decoding and overlays before Wayland is available?

[caligula]

Using Thunderbird-Wayland and Firefox-Wayland on daily basis with default setting. Only issue is when enabling OpenGL compositing on some systems. So far, both Thunderbird and Firefox on Wayland run smoothly on AMD Ryzen 2500u using latest stable amdgpu driver.

Compositing OpenGL
GPU #1
Active Yes
Description X.Org -- AMD RAVEN (DRM 3.27.0, 4.20.15-200.fc29.x86_64, LLVM 7.0.1)
Vendor ID X.Org
Device ID AMD RAVEN (DRM 3.27.0, 4.20.15-200.fc29.x86_64, LLVM 7.0.1)
Driver Version 4.5 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 18.3.4

Does Wayland require AMD DC stack? I'd like to try Wayland some day, but so far the AMD DC drivers have locked up almost daily (tried with Polaris and Vega). I also had some issues with the login manager. When I last tried, it seemed like only GDM supported Wayland. There hasn't been any code commits to lightdm in 7 months..

[shmerl]

Isn't that related to Wayland? It's not possible to optimize the video decoding and overlays before Wayland is available?

Not really. It's the question of using VAAPI and general accelerated compositing, which should be possible both in X and Wayland cases (including also WebRender path).

[Anvil]

Using Thunderbird-Wayland and Firefox-Wayland on daily basis with default setting. Only issue is when enabling OpenGL compositing on some systems. So far, both Thunderbird and Firefox on Wayland run smoothly on AMD Ryzen 2500u using latest stable amdgpu driver.

Compositing OpenGL
GPU #1
Active Yes
Description X.Org -- AMD RAVEN (DRM 3.27.0, 4.20.15-200.fc29.x86_64, LLVM 7.0.1)
Vendor ID X.Org
Device ID AMD RAVEN (DRM 3.27.0, 4.20.15-200.fc29.x86_64, LLVM 7.0.1)
Driver Version 4.5 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 18.3.4

Thunderbird60 ESR was a Mess of a release, which is why they held off till 60 instead of a tad earlier which would of made it more of a Mess than 60 ESR is now.

[Britoid]

It would make things better overall. GTK is just a mess. That's not Wayland specific. I suppose Firefox developers are so insistent on using GTK and even let already existing Qt Firefox branch die out, due to RedHat being heavy backers of Gnome and one of the major sponsors of Firefox Linux development. Since they are focused on GTK, Firefox tags along

Overall progress of Firefox on Linux feels quite slow. For instance hardware accelerated video encoding / decoding is missing for years and nobody seems to be working on it. This makes for example using Firefox with WebRTC on weaker laptops close to impossible due to CPU bottlenecking. I'm saying it as a long time Firefox user who doesn't use Chromium.

Firefox doesn't use GTK for its widgets/UI, it just inherits it's colours and styles from it, similar to Chrome.

[uid313]

uid will be sad...

I don't use Fedora, I use Ubuntu.
I tried Firefox nightly under Wayland, it works, but it have some bugs involving shadow on menus.

It is not just Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice suite also need to support Wayland. In other words give it another 5 years.

Also Chromium, Electron (Atom, Skype, Visual Studio Code, etc), GIMP, and VLC.

I ask those who have expertise in the matter, it's so complicated to bring an application from Xorg to native Wayland ?

It depends on the application. If it is a small application or a big application. If its a fresh application, or if its a old application using old and deprecated APIs.
If it a simple or complex application that implements its own way of doing things and directly does X11 calls.

I coded a GTK application using Python and it works great in both X and Wayland. There is no X-specific or Wayland-specific code. It is just GTK calls.

shouldn't Gnome Web be the default browser on the default Gnome Desktop distro?

It is, but distributions are free to pick-and-chose what software to ship.
So some distributions can chose to ship the GNOME desktop with GNOME Web, others are free to ship a GNOME-based distribution with Firefox or Chromium.

Not surprising. When this was first announced I mentioned that the bug tracker was still full of bugs blocking wayland (40+). It remains full of bugs.

I don't think announcing you want to do something is magically going to get all the roadblocks to disappear.

Link to list of Wayland-related bugs in Firefox: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635134
What to consider is not only the amount of bugs, but the significance of the bugs, i.e. which bugs are minor and which are blocking.