The Greenfield Wayland Compositor Can Now Run Apps Directly In Your Web Browser

Greenfield is the nearly two year old effort providing an in-browser, HTML5 Wayland compositor. This open-source project has allowed for remote Wayland applications to run in browsers while running from remote hosts. Greenfield though can now run applications directly inside a user's web browser via Web Worker threads.

Erik De Rijcke who masterminded Greenfield announced that applications can now run directly in browsers thanks to Web Workers. But in order to do so, the application must be using JavaScript or WebAssembly. Among other hinderances, this also currently requires a custom Wayland buffer protocol to be supported by the application as well. But once working, all the work is done in the client's web browser rather than running remotely on a web server.

So far there are two very basic apps as an example via the demo site at preview.greenfield.app. At least from my quick testing, the experience is much better in Chrome than Firefox.

More details on this latest Greenfield work via the Wayland mailing list.