Firefox 98 Set For Release With Dialog Element, Still Working On Wayland Support

Mozilla Firefox 98.0 binaries have hit the web today ahead of the formal release announcement tomorrow. There are various improvements in this latest monthly update to the Firefox web browser while its Wayland support for the Linux desktop remains ongoing.

Back in the Firefox 98.0 Alpha, the Firefox on Wayland support was enabled by default. However, the important caveat there is the default enabling is guarded by the "EARLY_BETA_OR_EARLIER" define. Some Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora already resorted to carrying the patch. For the time being it looks like this limitation will be there where only the Firefox Nightly and early alpha/beta releases will have Wayland support by default for the reference Firefox build until remaining issues are worked out and can be safely assumed Firefox Linux users with Wayland are running on new enough software stacks.

See this meta bug ticket that continues tracking various Firefox Wayland issues coming up, including some new bugs in recent days.

Firefox 98.0 has improvements to its download handling workflow and improved interactions with downloaded files. Firefox 98.0 also promotes its compatibility sidebar panel within the DevTools Inspector to now being official available, the "dialog" HTML element will now be available on the release channel, and other improvements. The HTML dialog element is for representing a dialog box or other interactive component.

At developer.mozilla.org is a look at the other developer-facing changes to enjoy with Firefox 98. This is also the release that disables by defaults its deprecated WebVR API.

Ahead of tomorrow's official announcement the Firefox 98.0 binaries can be found from the Mozilla.org server.