Mozilla Might Finally Enable Firefox's Wayland Backend Soon

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Mozilla Might Finally Enable Firefox's Wayland Backend Soon
phoronix.com
31

Firefox is surprisingly one of the few programs that has no/almost no glitches in wayland with nvidia.

The total of human days of work amounts to something like 1000 years+. Its a an incredible project.

And it needs even less memory than Electron, even if it runs as an own instance with a different profile! I replaced Discord with it a year ago and it's much better in literally every way. I just wish there would be a FF alternative for Electron.

I think there is something like that but it's really not popular and I'm not even sure it's maintained anymore

Try it with multiple monitors. Unless I manually enable native wayland, it flickers just like most other xwayland windows.

I meant using MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1, of course

only glitch recently is that I couldn't get multi-account containers to work. 2 years ago I couldn't even open setting's menu under wayland, so it's been evolving

it's not already enabled??

I think it was an option. Not by default

It’s an environment variable. I have MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=true in my sway wrapper script.

This is the best summary I could come up with:


While some Linux distributions like Fedora and Arch are enabling the native Wayland back-end for Firefox by default, upstream Firefox continues to not enable this Wayland support as part of their default builds.

Martin Stransky of Red Hat who is known for his Firefox work on Fedora today outlined the Firefox Linux improvements made last quarter.

He mentioned that the "Wayland backend is gaining momentum at Mozilla upstream."

There's this bug tracker for the status of shipping the Wayland back-end for Firefox releases.

Mozilla's Sylvestre Ledru commented last week that he's in favor of going ahead with the change as long as it's documented properly.

Martin also outlined in his Q3 Firefox Linux status blog post that dbus-glib has also been dropped as a build dependency for Firefox, Firefox supports a new kiosk mode, there is a new idle monitor/service implemented, and other Linux improvements.


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Well good thing I finally realized it wasn't enabled and set my environment variables to enable it.

Finally. I was having some weird graphical glitches, so I switched it to the Wayland backend, and I've not noticed any issues. It's totally stable (at least for me).

Huh, I'll give that a go as occasionally some black blocks and other artifacts appear for me- thought that it couldn't handle high def or something.

Will this fix copying from the url bar in kde?

Where the copied content would sometimes disappear from the clipboard? Iirc that's a KDE bug being fixed in 6

I just can’t copy anything from the URL bar at all.

Afaik that's a bug in Firefox, it doesn't cope well when middle click paste is disabled... As a workaround you can enable it again

I've been using this environment variable to enable Wayland for at least a year.... No issues.

I'm out of the loop, what's the wayland backend?

For most apps there's no difference, but dealing with multi-window apps that can spawn new windows, merge them, display video content in its own window etc. there's a lot of communication that Firefox has to do with the technology that draws its window to the screen.

I guess before now, default Firefox setups would've used XWayland to translate those communications which would've worked fine if not for some overhead and edge cases. This would make Firefox a truly Wayland-native application, when running on Wayland.

Would this let global menu (plasma) on Firefox work better under Wayland? I remember someone saying that Wayland was the reason it didn’t work.

Global menus work by exporting the menu over DBus. It has no relation to x11 or Wayland.

But I have been manually enabling it with a system environment variable and confirmed it was native wayland. No xwayland