Firefox 59 Might Ship With Working Wayland Support

Written by Michael Larabel in Mozilla on 25 January 2018 at 08:03 AM EST. 36 Comments
MOZILLA
Besides Firefox 59 being the release doing away with GTK2 support, this next Mozilla web-browser release might be the one to achieve working native Wayland support.

For seven years there has been Bug 635134 for tracking a Firefox Wayland port so the web-browser would play nicely on this next-gen alternative to the X.Org Server.

Nearly one hundred comments later over the years, the target milestone for Wayland has been updated today for "mozilla59". With the latest Firefox code, Wayland support can be enabled with the --enable-default-toolkit=cairo-gtk3-wayland switch.

But before getting too excited, there remain a number of open bugs around the Wayland support that block it from being in great shape. Among the items remaining are looking at Firefox using EGL with the Mesa drivers rather than GLX, some Cairo issues, using GTK APIs for notifications, HiDPI improvements, middle button clipboard support on Wayland, and some other minor issues.

Hopefully these remaining items can be addressed in time for Firefox 59.0 due out in March as indicated by the updated bug report today, but anyhow, at least it looks like the upstream native Wayland support for Firefox is finally close.
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