Mozilla Firefox 116 Now Available - Capable Of Wayland-Only Builds

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mozilla Firefox 116 Now Available - Capable Of Wayland-Only Builds

Ahead of the official announcement tomorrow, Mozilla Firefox 116 builds are available today for those wanting this latest open-source web browser...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-116-Available

[Sethox]

This makes things interesting. Makes me also wonder about the Flatpak version, "Wayland only Firefox-flatpak". All in all, it's interesting.

[Mthw]

... builds as an oiption ...

[avis]

This makes things interesting. Makes me also wonder about the Flatpak version, "Wayland only Firefox-flatpak". All in all, it's interesting.

How's limiting freedom become "interesting"? A pure Wayland Firefox build is not any "faster" or "better" than the one which supports X11 as well. Oh, it will save you a hundred of kilobytes of code. At the same time:

$ du -hs /opt/firefox
224M    /opt/firefox

That's the official Firefox 116 x86-64 Linux build. Yeah, that's really something ... I mean absolutely nothing to talk about.

[Sethox]

How's limiting freedom become "interesting"? A pure Wayland Firefox build is not any "faster" or "better" than the one which supports X11 as well. Oh, it will save you a hundred of kilobytes of code. At the same time:

$ du -hs /opt/firefox
224M /opt/firefox

That's the official Firefox 116 x86-64 Linux build. Yeah, that's really something ... I mean absolutely nothing to talk about.

It's an interesting development, now it really is split from X.org and Wayland builds and the community can hammer down the bugs that pleauges the application in the different branches. Of course nothing is perfect so there are both pros and cons to this method. I am just interested what will happen in the near future (since no one can predict the future, only speculate it).

[V1tol]

How's limiting freedom become "interesting"?.

What? How is adding an option becomes limiting freedom?

I mean absolutely nothing to talk about.

We don't know yet how much lighter Firefox will become. And count all the dependencies needed for X11 like XWayland etc. That can become a significant amount which can be critical for kiosk with 4GB eMMC flash or whatever.

[avis]

What? How is adding an option becomes limiting freedom?

That's an option to create a non-portable Firefox build. How's that "freedom"? What if the user suddenly has an urge to run Xorg? Get wrecked? No Firefox for you? One of the reasons commerical OSes are successful is because they do everything possible to preserve backward compatibility. Linux users on the other hand are obsessed with breaking what used to work in the past. Look where it's got Linux on the desktop so far. Pretty fucking nowhere. Let's celebrate that!

We don't know yet how much lighter Firefox will become. And count all the dependencies needed for X11 like XWayland etc. That can become a significant amount which can be critical for kiosk with 4GB eMMC flash or whatever.

We are likely talking about ~100KB of data for a 224MB application. What you wrote makes zero sense. Some websites front pages nowadays weigh in at as much as 20MB. So much for removing Xorg support.

<offtopic>Meanwhile Wayland has no concept of DPI and it only supports quite rigid fractional scaling which makes a lot of stuff look blurry on standard (less than 120) DPI screens - yeah, let's celebrate that. Maybe GTK/Qt solve this somehow that but not everything does.</offtopic>

[avis]

It's an interesting development, now it really is split from X.org and Wayland builds and the community can hammer down the bugs that pleauges the application in the different branches. Of course nothing is perfect so there are both pros and cons to this method. I am just interested what will happen in the near future (since no one can predict the future, only speculate it).

AFAIK Firefox Wayland and Xorg code paths are completely distinct. I don't think pure builds could possibly help improve Firefox. Even without "pure" builds Firefox still has a ton of Wayland issues to resolve: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635134

[ssokolow]

How's limiting freedom become "interesting"? A pure Wayland Firefox build is not any "faster" or "better" than the one which supports X11 as well.

Honestly, it sounds like an argument that make menuconfig for the Linux kernel is evil but with a slightly different coat of paint. Down with allowing cheapo SoC-based routers to not carry around giant bags of ISA/PCI/PCI-E peripheral drivers!

[oleid]

How's limiting freedom become "interesting"? A pure Wayland Firefox build is not any "faster" or "better" than the one which supports X11 as well.

It saves dependencies, if I don't need them. Not long and Gentoo users can disable X all together if they choose they want to.