Mozilla Now Ships Firefox Nightly Builds With Wayland Enabled

Written by Michael Larabel in Mozilla on 16 November 2018 at 05:16 AM EST. 32 Comments
MOZILLA
After what feels like an eternity in waiting years for Mozilla to ship their Firefox web-browser with native Wayland support enabled, their latest Firefox Nightly builds have achieved this milestone.

There have been Wayland patches for Firefox going back years but the Wayland support hasn't been enabled in the official Firefox binaries up until now. Starting yesterday, the Mozilla.org Firefox Nightly packages have Wayland support built-in and when launching Firefox if GDK_BACKEND=wayland is set, should now work with native Wayland rather than XWayland.

But before getting too excited, it looks like it could still be a while before the Wayland support is enabled by default where you don't need to worry about that environment variable set when launching the browser -- but that's really not a big deal and can be easily done by the user much more easily than building a re-configured Firefox.

Mozilla developers are hoping for any bug reports about lingering Firefox Wayland issues.
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