Fedora 30 Will Have Firefox Wayland By Default But Could Be Reverted If Too Buggy

The plan to use the Wayland-native version of Firefox by default for Fedora Workstation 30 atop GNOME has been tentatively approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo).

At this morning's FESCo meeting, the Fedora stakeholders approved of this late change to ship the Wayland-enabled version of Firefox by default, after they've been carrying this spin of Firefox in their package repository for several cycles but haven't made use of it out-of-the-box. This Firefox Wayland version will be used by Fedora 30 straight-away when running on the GNOME Shell Wayland session.

Those on Fedora 29 right now can evaluate the current Wayland Firefox support by installing the firefox-wayland package. Also, or on other distributions, the Firefox Wayland bits are maintained upstream now and if downloading Firefox Nightly you can launch Firefox with the MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 environment variable set for a similar effect.

Besides being able to avoid XWayland, the Wayland native version of Firefox should run faster, provide better font rendering, and better deal with HiDPI / display scaling, among other benefits. The default behavior expected for other Wayland desktops/compositors on Fedora 30 is still for the X11/XWayland version, but that can be overridden via the aforementioned environment variable.

This change was approved by FESCo but they do note it could be reverted if glitches are not fixed in time for the final Fedora 30 release due out in May.