Firefox Is Going To Try And Ship With Wayland Enabled By Default

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Firefox Is Going To Try And Ship With Wayland Enabled By Default

Guardrails have been in place where the Firefox browser has enabled Wayland by default (when running on recent GTK versions) but as of today that code has been removed... Firefox will try to move forward with stable releases where Wayland will ship by default!..

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-Change-Wayland-Release

[ehansin]

2024 - Year of the Linux desktop!! You cannot deny it, you cannot stop it

[gbcox]

Well, let's hope they pay a bit of attention to fit and finish and fix the titlebar to show the proper Fx icon instead of the generic yellow circle with a W in it for Wayland. Nightly 121 still displays the generic W.

[andyprough]

another big step forward

That's Wayland - so many "big steps". Only took 15 years to work well with GNU/Linux desktop's default browser. Amazing rate of progress.

I can only hope to live long enough to see it work with my favorite window manager. One can dream.

[ssokolow]

Well, let's hope they pay a bit of attention to fit and finish and fix the titlebar to show the proper Fx icon instead of the generic yellow circle with a W in it for Wayland. Nightly 121 still displays the generic W.

Let me guess. You used the tarball and didn't add it to your launcher menu? If so, that's not Mozilla's fault and there's nothing they can do to fix it.

Currently, Wayland has no protocol extension to allow applications to specify their icons. DEs look them up by working backwards from the installed .desktop files.

According to the people arguing against the proposal to add such an extension, it's an anti-phishing mechanism meant to prevent Flatpak'd/Snap'd applications from pretending to be other applications... though I have no idea how that's supposed to work when GNOME insisted on the ability for applications to demand CSD and then draw their own titlebars... when users are more likely to pay attention to the icon there than in the taskbar if it's something like a password prompt. (Especially if it's got "collapse all stuff for a given application into one icon" and both the attacking application and the application being attacked are already running.)

...on the plus side, as an app developer of the "What I care about is a good experience for my users" school of thought, I suppose that means that Qt applications can work around it by offering users the choice of having their portable apps look right by forcing the CSD they need to support GNOME DEs anyway or having them obey the user's KWin-chosen customizations by asking for SSD.

[oleid]

That's Wayland - so many "big steps". Only took 15 years to work well with GNU/Linux desktop's default browser. Amazing rate of progress.

That's momentum. Linux and it's GUI system is like a big mass in space. Initially, the acceleration was very small. That's why the velocity was only increasing slowly. Yet, over the years, more and more people got interested. Hence the increased acceleration.

The more I think about it, the more I like the image of XFree/Xorg being an inert mass 🤔

[oiaohm]

Let me guess. You used the tarball and didn't add it to your launcher menu? If so, that's not Mozilla's fault and there's nothing they can do to fix it.

Currently, Wayland has no protocol extension to allow applications to specify their icons. DEs look them up by working backwards from the installed.desktop files.

Not exactly working backwards. KDE and Gnome using systemd session management you have cgroups around applications that are created from the .desktop file used to start them. Remember this cgroup information is connected to file handles being passed around. So indirectly included in the Wayland protocol.

Now you want to track how much network, memory.... firefox is using cleanly you need to be running firefox under some form of session management.

The reason you give for why this is not right. There is a document denial of service attack against against X11 Windows managers caused by X11 applications getting the creative idea of spam changing their icon. The .desktop method does fix this problem. .desktop is read when the session around application is created and then may never be read again. So 1 shot to set your application icon.

Applications spam changing icon are applications getting creative ideas like changing the application icon based on ram usage or network usage or some other rapid changing thing that the very act of updating the icon can be causing the event that its reporting.

So this is another one of these questions should application icon be the wayland protocol or should it be indirect like cgroup/jail defined that will travel with file handles being passed around instead.

[Vermilion]

That's Wayland - so many "big steps". Only took 15 years to work well with GNU/Linux desktop's default browser. Amazing rate of progress.

Are you... trolling?
Wayland compositors supported Firefox for years, either as a native app or through Xwayland. It's Firefox that were reluctant to switch the defaults, same for their hardware acceleration.

[pkese]

another big step forward

And a step backward as well.
Wayland doesn't let browsers restore windows across multiple desktops.
X.org has no problems with that.

[Serafean]

...on the plus side, as an app developer of the "What I care about is a good experience for my users" school of thought, [...]

Usually this school of thought never takes into account how the app fits into the rest of the system.

For instance, when an app has custom notifications instead of using the Desktop Notification d-bus protocol, where the user has control over the notifications (placement, design, timeout, silent mode). That is the sign of a selfish developer, with the philosophy "my app is the only one that runs".
What gets me livid is the don't theme our apps movement. As an app developer I have no idea about the way the end machine displays colors, even less how the user sees them.
CSD is a bane that should never have existed: Window decorations are a way to interact with the window manager, not the app. How do you shade a CSD window? Change the order/location of minimize/close buttons? (muscle memory is a thing)

I'm not sure why this sent me off on a rant, anyway...
Just please never forget your app is just one of dozens running on a system. And that you cannot make any assumptions about the system. Your app being an app is at best the second most important thing it is, the first being a citizen on a system.