Mozilla Firefox 116 To Allow For Wayland-Only Builds

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mozilla Firefox 116 To Allow For Wayland-Only Builds

Another exciting milestone has been reached on Mozilla's long journey of improving the native Wayland support for the Firefox web browser on Linux...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-116-Allow-Wayland-Only

[AnErrupTion]

They are allowing Wayland-only builds but they won't fix a 19 year old bug...

[qlum]

I am sure some gentoo users would be very happy about this even if the rest of linux will probably not go that route for a while.

[skeevy420]

I'm glad that I realized the majority of the Firefox problems I had was due to Wayland and me trying so many things out that I simply forgot to redo the usual Firefox Wayland environment variables and about:config stuff. I hope this improves that negative experience when switching between X and W.

I'm curious how distributions will respond, if we'll start seeing firefox-wayland and firefox-x11 packages, and if Firefox will get a dumb launcher which will check for X or W to launch the appropriate version.

[AnErrupTion]

I'm glad that I realized the majority of the Firefox problems I had was due to Wayland and me trying so many things out that I simply forgot to redo the usual Firefox Wayland environment variables and about:config stuff. I hope this improves that negative experience when switching between X and W.

I'm curious how distributions will respond, if we'll start seeing firefox-wayland and firefox-x11 packages, and if Firefox will get a dumb launcher which will check for X or W to launch the appropriate version.

Most distributions will probably keep compiling for both X11 and Wayland.

[ssokolow]

I'm curious how distributions will respond, if we'll start seeing firefox-wayland and firefox-x11 packages, and if Firefox will get a dumb launcher which will check for X or W to launch the appropriate version.

More likely there will be no difference outside of distros that drop support for X.org desktop sessions entirely, for the same reason you don't have separate packages or dumb launchers when things have ./configure flags like --enable-jpeg and --enable-png.

Making and QAing multiple builds is more work for the distro, even if they're not maintaining their own launcher.

[MorrisS.]

It's a good news towards only Wayland operating systems.

[Joe2021]

More likely there will be no difference outside of distros that drop support for X.org desktop sessions entirely, for the same reason you don't have separate packages or dumb launchers when things have ./configure flags like --enable-jpeg and --enable-png.

Making and QAing multiple builds is more work for the distro, even if they're not maintaining their own launcher.

I do not think that a comparison of --enable-jpeg with --enable-x11 is valid. The latter pulls in quite a bunch of dependencies of which more and more are considered unmaintained.

[Danny3]

Nice, but honestly I'm more interested in Firefox enabling Wayland support by default, on stable release, when it's running in a Wayland session on KDE Plasma or Gnome, so this bug to be fixed:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1752398

After that I'm interested in Firefox enabling and using the default file picker on the distro / DE, by default, on stable release, instead of its own crappy GTK file picker.
Even Steam has fixed this problem.
I'm honestly very tired of always having to search the Arch wiki to find how those environment variables are called and create them after each OS install / reinstall.
I even forgot to set them for two friends for which I installed Linux on their computers.

There are so many things to do and I cannot always remember to set them.

[ehansin]

I am going to get on a slight tangent here, but I like what they are doing this, even if we don't see these as separate builds in distros anytime soon. On my Linux boot, I would be fine as pretty much Wayland-only (though have XWayland pulled in, and know it is needed for some things for now.) I have the default Fedora Workstation installed, just to get the "core plumbing" taken care of, but was mostly running Sway.

Just to "test the waters", I have installed Hikari, River, and Labwc as other lightweight Wayland desktop managers. None of these exactly did it for me. But recently installed Hyprland via a Copr repo, and oh boy! Just enough animation to be tasteful (Wayfire is a bit too much - cube workspaces and wobbly, burning, and off-kilter windows were cool back in 2007 via Compiz, but...)

Anyway, as I said, was going to get off-topic. But main point, I'm happy with where the Wayland ecosystem is headed and happy to be running any Wayland-only options.