Firefox 75 On Wayland Now To Have Full WebGL, Working VA-API Acceleration

[treba]

... Open Source is desperately lacking developers and instead of helping them, yeah, let's create a brand new graphics server which is unusable by itself....

I heavily agree on the first point (and I guess almost everyone is) but the second half is where I and almost all Xorg and DE devs disagree: X11 is a dead horse, the sooner we leave it behind, the better (btw. that's also why Martin Stransky only implemented the DMABUF work for Wayland: it is totally possible on X11, too, but a lot of extra work that is better invested in making the Wayland experience better). So if you want to help with the situation, please contribute to help filling the missing gaps (and if you don't like Gnome and all its forks and downstreams, or KDE, maybe some DE based on wlroots fits you better).

X11 is just another old technology in the line of ALSA, initd etc. that might work well for you know now but are not ready for the future. Maybe we should turn the arguments around a bit: where is the sandbox support in X11? How well does you screen saver work (can it be blocked by any random popup)? Does any car company use it for their embedded systems? Why not? Can you have per monitor HiPDI scaling? How well is touch support working? How well is touchpad gesture support working? Which modern toolkit makes use of those features that X11 has but Wayland doesn't? Which modern toolkit allows you to use the arcane X11 network transparency in a way that it is more efficient than the modern alternatives that are available in Wayland? Can you make use of hardware overlays? How much workarounds and extra synchronisation does a WM need to implement to get a not too glitchy desktop? Which WM does implement which subset of X11 related protocols? Which apps make proper use of them (e.g. which apps properly set opaque regions)? How much can a WM on X11 benefit from that, compared to a Wayland compositor? Does your WM need to unredirect fullscreen apps to get optimal performance? Does that create tearing for you? How energy efficient can Xorg plus WM be, in comparison to a Wayland compositor? How well is 10bit color support looking? Can Firefox/Webrender implement compositor integration to be as energy efficient on X11 as Windows/MacOS? Does that work on Wayland (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1617498 )?

And this is just a short list...

[darkbasic]

Stupid forum software broke the layout, but you can still read the list and find that 1080p h264 is there, both 30fps (format 137) and 60fps (format 299).

Nice, but unfortunately if h264ify is broken it's still of little use

[zxy_thf]

All this rage...

Another thing:
I really don't think X11 will be supported by this. See stransky's blog from today:

https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/03/03/webgl-and-fgx-acceleration-on-wayland/

So X11 people will never get this, which makes sense to me, because X11 is a dead end. Hell, they don't even get bugfix releases out of the door anymore...

The technical reason they don't support X11 is hilarious; Wayland requires OpenGL to run so your OpenGL must be Okay for Wayland Firefox's needs.
Sounds like "Windows 7 Compatible" label on my laptop

[birdie]

X.org works and it provides rich interfaces. Wayland works for special use cases and have a lot of limitations while providing almost no interfaces. Wayland would have been excusable, had it been a few years old with no major backers. But it's 11 effing years old and it's heavily backed by RedHat and Intel. I mean it took Microsoft a lot less to develop Windows GDI - basically it started with Windows 3 (1990) and was fully complete (and largely rewritten) with Windows NT 4.0, i.e. in five years. All Windows apps which have been written ever since use Win32 APIs which date back to Windows 95 days. And they preserved APIs while doing all of that - 16bit Windows 3 apps were trivial to port to Win32 and they even worked without porting.

You're absolutely right about X.org and how complicated it has turned to be. Only its replacement is not a magical solution. It still feels as a half-assed solution nowhere near the level which is required from from a modern graphics subsystem (e.g. found in Android). I mean Google did it right the first time. Yeah, they had no compatibility to keep at all, but somehow Surface worked and provided almost everything (except windowing which is essential on desktop) required from the get go. Open Source developers are seemingly not interested in backward compatibility. The world meanwhile couldn't care less about this constant breakage as indicated by the Linux market share which has remained near zero (among general population) for the past 20 years. The 2% which people keep referring to mainly consist of IT professionals.

Wake me up when Wayland starts offering a GUI for modifying monitor modelines. In the world of Windows this feature has been available since Windows 95. It's year 2020 and people still often need to wrestle with GTF to get their monitors refresh right right in Linux. In Windows I go to NVIDIA control panel, add a custom refresh rate for my monitor, bam, DONE. Why is it that each Wayland compositor has its own hardware configuration which should in theory apply to all of them? Again, no APIs for that, each compositor has to reinvent the wheel. Super duper Wayland, super duper KMS, the super duper Linux kernel and we still have nothing alike. God, this cesspool of poorly designed and implemented technologies in Linux will probably never end. Everything is done to drive the average Joe away from Linux. And the poor sod had to understand why in his Fedora part of applications cannot share clipboard between them since some of them are native to Wayland and some run in Xwayland.

https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/bl...and-clipboard/

Unlike the X11 clipboard on Wayland clients are normally not informed about clipboard changes. Only the application currently having keyboard focus gets informed by the Wayland server about what kind of data is available on the clipboard. This means we don’t need to inform all Wayland clients about changes in the X11 clipboard and similar we don’t need to inform X11 about clipboard changes in Wayland all the time.

Breakage on top of breakage. Yeah, I know it's an old post, the problem has probably long been solved but why Wayland DE's have to go through circles of hell to get everything right and they still cannot get some features right because "Effing modern light protocol"? Why not design a protocol which is rich out of the box and takes very little effort to write applications for? Where's GDI for Wayland? Why does each Wayland app have to render fonts, vector UI elements and everything else by itself? Why does we need to recreate graphics rendering in GTK, Qt, Enlightment, etc. etc. etc.? How can we tell all those disparate toolkits that they have to change their settings to look alike? Questions, question, questions.

In the end the user doesn't bloody care! His Windows 10 PC works perfectly out of the box. He doesn't have to understand how the system works because it works.

Sorry, I'm still not convinced. Yes, X.org/xlib needs to be replaced. Wayland doesn't seem like a good solution overall.

[DanL]

When are we ever going to finish the Tower of Babel? We've been trying for centuries!

[Hibbelharry]

The technical reason they don't support X11 is hilarious; Wayland requires OpenGL to run so your OpenGL must be Okay for Wayland Firefox's needs.
Sounds like "Windows 7 Compatible" label on my laptop

No, it's different, and it's not hilarious. X11 is a pile of old cruft. Since all X11 lib stuff and core functionality died long time ago, it's a giant pile of workarounds to make anything remotely modern work. You can't really depend on anything there, X11 is broken beyond repair. It's like a really old plane with a lot of duct tape: you need hope, and you need to pray.

On the other hand: If your system manages to open a firefox windows on Wayland, you know quite a lot of problems can't exist anymore. You know other already did the hart work, and you can depend on that for the most part. That's enough.

[pal666]

Why didn't they start with supporting X.org? I couldn't care less about Wayland which is still largely a tech demo.

because they couldn't care less about people living in imaginary worlds

[pal666]

On the other hand: If your system manages to open a firefox windows on Wayland, you know quite a lot of problems can't exist anymore. You know other already did the hart work, and you can depend on that for the most part. That's enough.

relevant quote from blogpost "Working gfx acceleration is a sort of prerequisite to even start a decent Wayland compositor like Mutter or Plasma so when Firefox is launched on Wayland we can pretty much expect working GL environment". it seems solution for x11 is "if we are running from mutter or plasma we can pretty much expect working GL environment"

[pal666]

1. KDE has major troubles working around Wayland which speaks volumes about Wayland APIs. It's not like KDE devs are stupid.

you have several non sequiturs here. garbage in - garbage out

KWin and other window managers crash far too often

try to use your brain a little. maybe this is a sign of something other than wayland's badness?

[pal666]

That's only H.264! No accelrated Youtube sorry, we need VP9 support.

do you have hardware with vp9 support?