Firefox 78.0 Released - Also Serves As The Newest ESR Version

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Firefox 78.0 Released - Also Serves As The Newest ESR Version

Firefox 78.0 is available this morning as the newest version of Mozilla's web browser. Firefox 78.0 is also significant in being the newest Extended Support Release (ESR) series...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...-78.0-Released

[144Hz]

Changes to Wayland support?

[treba]

Changes to Wayland support?

Lots, as always. Probably most important: quite good vaapi support (1) and partial present with WR (2). But both still hidden behind configs, like Wayland support in general.

1: https://mastransky.wordpress.com/202...pi-on-wayland/
2: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1620076

[andyprough]

Seems kind of ugly for some reason compared to firefox-esr 68 and to palemoon.

[bug77]

Too bad the IT guys decided to configure Firefox in such a way that it doesn't open any page in under 5 seconds anymore. The work computer is the only one that cares about ESRs, everywhere else I'm using the beta channel.

[brent]

Partial present? That's quite a killer feature as far as performance (on low-end GPUs) and power efficiency is concerned. Looking forward to using it. It's quite annoying right now that a small spinner or some other small animations keep the GPU busy big time. Partial present should help with that.

[ix900]

Too bad the IT guys decided to configure Firefox in such a way that it doesn't open any page in under 5 seconds anymore. The work computer is the only one that cares about ESRs, everywhere else I'm using the beta channel.

That's what happens when you keep browsing phoronix on your work computer lol.

If only all people used their work computers correctly there would be no need to garbage it up (and of course if there weren't idiots trying to steal info and all that security jazz) but its 50% of it or so.

[DanL]

The good news is that it looks like video decode is finally coming together under X: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bu...id=1619523#c18

[treba]

Partial present? That's quite a killer feature as far as performance (on low-end GPUs) and power efficiency is concerned. Looking forward to using it. It's quite annoying right now that a small spinner or some other small animations keep the GPU busy big time. Partial present should help with that.

Indeed, that's why it's a blocker for WR by default. It will also work on both, X11 and Wayland (1). Next step will be compositor integration, but that's only possible on Wayland (2).

1: thus the switch to EGL on X11, so it can reuse the Wayland / Android partial damage implementation - fortunately that also makes it easy to reuse the DMABUF / VAAPI implementation as well. Unfortunately, mesa does not yet support the needed extension on X11, https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/3030
2: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1617498

[bug77]

That's what happens when you keep browsing phoronix on your work computer lol.

If only all people used their work computers correctly there would be no need to garbage it up (and of course if there weren't idiots trying to steal info and all that security jazz) but its 50% of it or so.

I seriously doubt there's a need to bastardize the browser like that after you've installed an always-on AV (the "greatest" idea on a programmer's machine, constantly reading and writing code from/to the disk) and pigeonholed all traffic through a proxy.