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

[Britoid]

This is great, but Wayland support in Firefox is still pretty buggy, and recently suffered from regressions such as this:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1615098

That makes Firefox pretty much unusable at the moment.

I just noticed this, plus menus sometimes go off screen when Firefox is maximized.

[TemplarGR]

This is great, but Wayland support in Firefox is still pretty buggy, and recently suffered from regressions such as this:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1615098

That makes Firefox pretty much unusable at the moment.

Unusable? No. You are overreacting. I have been using Firefox 73 on Wayland for many days and while it gets annoying sometimes, it is far, far from unusable.

[cmakeshift]

VA-API acceleration is what is going to make me take the plunge and go full Wayland.
No more constant 10% CPU usage for watching a video on the bed. Finally.

[treba]

It would be interesting to see some benchmark between the Firefox/Chromium solution and the real hardware decoding (vlc, mplayer, mpv, etc.).

It is *real* hardware decoding. It uses vaapi+dmabuf, which is what the other players do, too, and the way it is supposed to be done. *If* it does not perform as good as other players yet, that will likely be issues in the browser engine AFAIK (such as https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1579235)

When did Firefox officially support Wayland?

Hopefully/likely they will turn the switch on this year. There are some issues left, but Fedora 31 already had it on by default, so a lot of things got ironed out.

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

X11 is pretty much in maintenance mode already. Don't expect developers to invest much in it any more - it's just painful and the faster users switch to Wayland, the better.

[brent]

Unusable? No. You are overreacting. I have been using Firefox 73 on Wayland for many days and while it gets annoying sometimes, it is far, far from unusable.

Unfortunately not. The browser isn't really usable if you can't properly interact with it with the mouse. It's not just the hover effect that's broken, there's more to this issue. But even a broken hover effect alone makes it very irritating to use. I quickly downgraded to Firefox 72 after encountering the problem.

BTW, the problem doesn't exist on GNOME 3.34.x, only on 3.35/3.36 or on 3.34 with specific performance-enhancing patches. GNOME introduced more efficient culling of redundant surfaces updates, and Firefox does not handle that correctly yet.

[TemplarGR]

Unfortunately not. The browser isn't really usable if you can't properly interact with it with the mouse. It's not just the hover effect that's broken, there's more to this issue. But even a broken hover effect alone makes it very irritating to use. I quickly downgraded to Firefox 72 after encountering the problem.

BTW, the problem doesn't exist on GNOME 3.34.x, only on 3.35/3.36 or on 3.34 with specific performance-enhancing patches. GNOME introduced more efficient culling of redundant surfaces updates, and Firefox does not handle that correctly yet.

Dude, stop spreading FUD. I have been using Firefox on Wayland heavily these days, and i have no issue whatsoever completing my work. What are you talking about? Yes, links don't get visibly highlighted (but are still clickable normally), sometimes you need to clik inside a frame in order to pass control to it (instead of gettin the focus automatically) plus sometimes the switch of focus is mistakenly placed, but other than that Firefox is production ready as it is. You are just a drama queen. "Not usable" means people can't use it. Well, people can use Firefox today on Wayland just fine. It is just an annoying bug that will get fixed soon.

[darkbasic]

For anyone who wants to try this, it's only enabled for H.264. Use the h264ify add-on to for that if you want to test on YouTube.

Most of the youtube videos don't get encoded with h.264 anymore, so chances are most of them won't work. Why only H.264? It's kind of stupid...

[GrayShade]

Most of the youtube videos don't get encoded with h.264 anymore, so chances are most of them won't work. Why only H.264? It's kind of stupid...

To validate the implementation. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1619258 is for testing VP9, while AV1 is too new to have hardware decode.

[GrayShade]

Dude, stop spreading FUD. I have been using Firefox on Wayland heavily these days, and i have no issue whatsoever completing my work. What are you talking about? Yes, links don't get visibly highlighted (but are still clickable normally), sometimes you need to clik inside a frame in order to pass control to it (instead of gettin the focus automatically) plus sometimes the switch of focus is mistakenly placed, but other than that Firefox is production ready as it is. You are just a drama queen. "Not usable" means people can't use it. Well, people can use Firefox today on Wayland just fine. It is just an annoying bug that will get fixed soon.

Let it go. I've been using Wayland Firefox full-time since it came out in Nightly until a couple of days ago, when I switched back to X11. It's that bad.

[Gusar]

Partially the same if they're using vaapi, but Firefox is taking it an extra step and using dmabuf which doesn't work under X and avoids copying around pixels. This would also have the advantage of letting you eventually use hardware planes dedicated for video.

Of course dmabuf works under X, where does this notion come from that it supposedly doesn't?

mpv uses VAAPI in the exact same way under X and Wayland and there's no copies being done either way. It's very simple - grab hardware surface handle using vaExportSurfaceHandle(), import surface data into OpenGL using EGL_EXT_image_dma_buf_import. mpv does exactly that, and it doesn't matter if it's under X or Wayland. If Firefox can't do that in X, that's a Firefox limitation, not something inherent in X.