Firefox 76 Released With WebRender Improvements, Better Security

[TemplarGR]

Just installed Firefox 76 from Arch testing repo. Hardware vaapi and hardware webgl work fine on my Tonga with latest stable Mesa. It has happened folks! At last proper hardware acceleration support! A big thank you to Martin Stransky for his efforts!

[bug77]

hardware decoding under X is not impossible, but it is no use because the composing is not done by the display driver, so the decoded image has to be copied from the GPU back to X and then back to the GPU. To fix this, Firefox would need to change a lot of things. They had to change things to work with wayland anyway, and they designed it so that effective hardware decoding was relatively easy; more like a sideeffect. But they won't rewrite the X code just to enable hardware decoding. And "they" is largely people funded by RedHat, who are really clear that Wayland is the future. And now, with this, apparently the future is getting a lot closer. Now the linux desktop has a mainstream dpi-adapting hardware-decoding browser.

Ok, two very different code paths will do it for pretty much any programmer, thanks for the explanation.

[skeevy420]

Wayland serves as a "minimum requirement" label that you can found on lots of boxed software, while Xorg can even run with a very buggy GPU stack.

Any pictures of said boxes? Genuinely curious.

[brent]

X support doesn't really matter at this point. The video decode acceleration is ridiculously bad/unfinished, unfortunately. It works, but for some reason hardly reduces CPU load and there are various issues with crashes and video stutter.

[treba]

I'm not even sure why video hardware acceleration has anything to do with the display server. I mean, sure, the display server has to present the result, but why does it care where and how the result comes from?

Not really, it's just work that needs to be done because things work slightly differently. Judging from their blog(1) their (IMO amazing) GFX team is mostly busy bringing Webrender into shape, with a focus on Windows and MacOS while Linux etc. still benefit from that work but are not in focus atm. AFAIK the only really dedicated Linux devs are currently Martin Stránský and Jan Horak - the Fedora Firefox team - and they understandably focus their work on Wayland. Otherwise there are AFAIK only some independent contributors - and apparently they are also more focused on Wayland. So in order to get things working on X11, someone who actually cares about it would need to step up :/

1: https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/202...newsletter-52/

[Danny3]

"Firefox displays critical alerts in the Lockwise password manager when a website is breached".
What does this mean, every website that I visit is sent to Mozilla for their so called website breach detector or only those that I save passwords for?
As long as the database of breached websites this is not offline, I think it's a serious privacy breach from a browser that it says it protects your privacy.
How about an opt-in for such a feature?
Until someone clears this in a positive way, I think this is another type of data collection from the Greedy Mozilla.

[brent]

hardware decoding under X is not impossible, but it is no use because the composing is not done by the display driver, so the decoded image has to be copied from the GPU back to X and then back to the GPU.

Yawn. This gets repeated ad nauseam for some reason, but again, this is WRONG, of course. X has all the tools needed required for efficient video decode acceleration without CPU<->GPU round trip. You may need to copy video frames on the GPU, but that's rather cheap and required on Wayland in most common cases, too.

[perpetually high]

Real men copy the video link to clipboard and paste it to mpv for proper hardware decoding

[treba]

hardware decoding under X is not impossible, but it is no use because the composing is not done by the display driver, so the decoded image has to be copied from the GPU back to X and then back to the GPU. To fix this, Firefox would need to change a lot of things. They had to change things to work with wayland anyway, and they designed it so that effective hardware decoding was relatively easy; more like a sideeffect. But they won't rewrite the X code just to enable hardware decoding. And "they" is largely people funded by RedHat, who are really clear that Wayland is the future. And now, with this, apparently the future is getting a lot closer. Now the linux desktop has a mainstream dpi-adapting hardware-decoding browser.

Na, I don't think so. What you need is Webrender and some dmabuf work, but there's nothing fundamentally more difficult apparently (1). One of the steps that has to be done is switching from GLX to EGL - and there's at least some work on that going on (2). That would also make Webrender enabling on X11 easier.

1: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1619523
2: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=788319

[bug77]

"Firefox displays critical alerts in the Lockwise password manager when a website is breached".
What does this mean, every website that I visit is sent to Mozilla for their so called website breach detector or only those that I save passwords for?
As long as the database of breached websites this is not offline, I think it's a serious privacy breach from a browser that it says it protects your privacy.
How about an opt-in for such a feature?
Until someone clears this in a positive way, I think this is another type of data collection from the Greedy Mozilla.

As long as you store the username and password, you also store the website they're for. That's how it works. And it's opt-in, you don't have to save your username and password if you don't want to