Fedora 30 Planning To Use Wayland-Enabled Firefox By Default

For the past two and a half years there has been a non-default Firefox package with Wayland support available to Fedora users running Fedora Workstation with the GNOME Shell. For the Fedora 30 release due out this spring, they are planning to ship the Firefox Wayland back-end by default.

The Wayland support for Firefox is now mature enough that Red Hat is planning to use the Firefox Wayland build by default when running on the GNOME Shell with Mutter Wayland compositor - it's not being enabled for other Wayland compositor options on Fedora at this time.

The Wayland support for Firefox is now mature enough and caught up that they are comfortable with it and that compared to Firefox on (X)Wayland, it should be faster and smoother font rendering while better supporting HiDPI displays and other features.

The details on this plan for Fedora 30 can be found via this change proposal.

Those wanting to try out the Firefox Wayland support on the current Fedora 29 release can do so with sudo dnf install firefox-wayland.

Fedora 30 is due out in May. Fedora Workstation 30 will be shipping with the GNOME 3.32 desktop and on that front there are many Wayland support improvements and performance optimizations.