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.

With the Firefox 116 release, it will now be possible to enable Wayland-only Linux builds of Firefox. To this point even if caring just about Wayland support, the X11 dependencies have still been pulled into the Firefox builds. But now it's possible with the latest Firefox development code to specify "cairo-gtk3-wayland-only" if wanting to exclusively support Wayland without all the baggage of X.Org.

The past month has seen activity around this ticket to make it possible for Firefox to support X11 and Wayland only builds.

Thanks to the work of Red Hat's Martin Stránský, the new build controls are possible to allow for Wayland-only Firefox binaries. All the necessary gating for the Firefox builds to properly handle the X11 and Wayland only paths along with dependencies around VA-API and DMA-BUF were merged on Friday. Firefox 116 is slated for release around 1 August.