
PSA: Firefox Nightly now with experimental Wayland support - glandium
https://glandium.org/blog/?p=3899
======
jitl
Great! I recently set up desktop Linux, and was disappointed to find poor
support for fractional scaling on HiDPI screens, which I’m used to coming from
retina MacBook Pro. Gnome under X11 only has 1x, 2x and 3x scaling. In
Wayland, Gnome has experimental support for fractional scaling - including
1.75x, the size I’m used to. However, Xwayland apps like Firefox stable (and
chrome) render blurry with fractional scaling. So, very cool to see this major
program get Wayland support and thus high quality HiDPI support.

~~~
JonathonW
Does Gnome under X11 allow you to set the desktop's size higher than the
screen resolution and scale that down? Because that's all Apple's "fractional"
scaling does-- macOS only supports integer scaling (specifically, 1x and 2x;
iOS does 3x but not macOS); the "more space" scaling settings just render the
screen at a resolution higher than the physical size of the panel and scale it
to fit (for example, current 15" MacBook Pro panels are physically 2880x1800;
the default screen resolution on the current machines is 3360x2100 with 2x
scaling).

~~~
kuschku
Gnome does exactly that.

While Android, Windows, Qt/KDE and the web went with real fractional scaling,

GTK/Gnome, macOS and iOS went with just increasing the framebuffer size and
scaling it down.

As result, when rendering a GTK app (be it a video player or a game like
Minecraft) on a 4K screen at 1.5x scale, you're actually rendering it at 6K
resolution, which utterly destroys performance.

~~~
vetinari
Gnome seems to do that per window, not per framebuffer like macOS does. The
framebuffer size seems to be exactly the display resolution, plus you need GPU
to do window scaling, you cannot let the output encoder to do the job.

The Windows and Qt approach has it's own issues with fractional pixel
positions, and the resulting problem with mapping integer input coordinates to
these. And of course, it doesn't work nice with legacy apps (Gnome has to
handle X11 apps, that won't tell anything about the scale they work with. See
also: Gimp).

------
secure
Chromium also just declared experimental Wayland support:
[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=578890...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=578890&desc=2#c102)

~~~
glandium
If I'm reading this correctly, you have to build your own Chromium to test it,
which is what you had to do for Firefox... until today. Now you can just
download it.

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finalfantasia
Fedora 29 has a “firefox-wayland” package that runs the latest stable release
of Firefox (63 as of now) on Wayland (instead of XWayland). I’ve been using it
for a long while and it’s been great!

~~~
mjepronk
Did you have any problems with copy-paste? For me copy-paste was completely
broken.

~~~
vetinari
Copy-paste works, but primary selection does not, it was added to wayland-
protocols just few days ago. Drag-and-drop also seems to be broken, I cannot
drag urls to the terminal, for example.

~~~
mjepronk
Hmm, a few weeks ago Ctrl-C Ctrl-V didn't even work on Fedora 29. With the
latest Nightly everything seems to work fine on Wayland, even dragging a URL
to GNOME Terminal.

Also, without XWayland I have no artifacts when scrolling fast in long
documents. Very nice :-)

------
xvilka
Anyone knows, what is the progress of migrating to Servo/WebRender? What parts
are still in C++, what parts are being rewritten, and what are not?

~~~
finalfantasia
They post newsletters[1] about WebRender on a regular basis.

[1] [https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2018/11/15/webrender-
newsle...](https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2018/11/15/webrender-
newsletter-30/)

~~~
xvilka
It doesn't answer my question though, especially about Servo part and what
parts are still C++.

~~~
lern_too_spel
They will never migrate to Servo. Servo is a full web browser used as a
platform for testing components of a web browser that have been written in
Rust like WebRender. GP's comment answers your question about the status of
WebRender.

~~~
xvilka
Obviously, I meant the parts of Servo like Stylo for example.

~~~
rebelwebmaster
Stylo has been shipping as part of desktop Firefox since the launch of version
57 last year. And with Firefox for Android since version 60.

~~~
xvilka
I know about Stylo. But like WebRender it is only a small part of browser
engine. I am asking about the rest. No information whatsoever.

------
w323898
It's funny that this is happening right when I've decided that Wayland is old
and busted and Arcan is the new hotness.

Let's face it, everyone is sick of Linux cruft and is waiting on Redox to
clean things up. Everything will come soon.

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SilasX
How about experimental "customizeable keyboard shortcuts that don't require
you to be on a loaded html page"? Or is that too "Firefox 2003"?

------
shmerl
That's great! How is WebRender on Wayland + Vulkan progressing by the way?

I'm still postponing switch to Wayland, until major KWin bugs (like flickering
one) are fixed.

~~~
nwah1
I'm running the nightly on KWin and wayland right now, and typing this from
there.

Alas, setting about:config gfx.webrender.all to true results in the window
being blank, if using it in native wayland mode.

Apparently there's some upstream improvements coming to kwayland that will
help.

WebRender itself is very stable. So much so that it is on by default for beta
users on Windows with Nvidia. Recent weeks have also saw much better memory
usage.

~~~
shmerl
But it's not using Vulkan yet.

KWin itslef still has this bug which is very irritating:
[https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=387313](https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=387313)

------
pmarreck
What is this? Is this like a new XWindows client/server where the web browser
can act as the client?

~~~
tomjakubowski
Wayland is a different display API and protocol altogether. It is an
alternative to X, designed with modern graphics hardware in mind.

[https://wayland.freedesktop.org](https://wayland.freedesktop.org)

~~~
kevin_b_er
And explicitly designed against remote desktop and remote windowing with an
actively antagonistic view toward the concept.

~~~
Avamander
That also means screen recording is going to be just as or even more painful
than it is on X11. Not really an encouraging thing for gaming, streaming and
video-making on Linux and that's a huge pity.

------
mbrumlow
Very exciting, but this is very very slow on my x220 compared to xwayland --
running swaywm.

~~~
Jonnax
Isn't that laptop from like 6 years ago?

I'd imagine your GPU is very much considered legacy.

~~~
mbrumlow
I am running webrender under xwayland, and it is super smooth. This system is
damn near the best laptop I have ever had. I have replaced the bios with core
boot and have a fully encrypted luks disk. I get near 15 hours battery life.
All that for the price of $150 + plus a few premium upgrades (ssd, and ips
panel).

My T450s cost me ~$2700 new, and it is faster in some cases, but the
cost/performance ratio just does not pay off to have such a expensive system
these days.

Should also note, that because the x220 has a higher TDP than newer ultrabooks
I can get a few things done faster. The last time I tried emacs compiles near
20 seconds faster on the x220 than a T450s.

I also found a neat hack, not related to the x220, but any laptop really. When
I am waiting on long compiles I take a compressed air can and turn it upside
down and jet the cool liquid into the heat sink. The temp drops and you can
shave a bit of time off a compile or what not if you have the wherewithal to
continue to deliver small shots of cool fluid. I mostly feel okay doing it
because it is only a $150 laptop...

~~~
fyfy18
Do you not feel limited by the CPU? I had a Macbook Air with a 4th gen Core i5
and at times it was really slow just for day to day browsing. Maybe that was
just thermal throttling though.

Now I've switched to a T470s which seems a good trade off between size,
connectivity and performance. It's roughly the same size as my Macbook Air
(13", 2014) but a little lighter, and has ports for HDMI, Ethernet, USB 3.0
x3, audio, USB-C/TB3 and dock connector. I only get maybe 6 hours on the
battery which is a bit disappointing though...

~~~
mbrumlow
No not at all. I do everything on this system -- except gaming, which is a
waste of time mostly -- I already clocked in what 3 or 4 years of real time on
WoW? The needle is out, and I am going to stay clean this time :p But DK solo
tanking was amazing while it lasted. World PvP prot pally was also fun.

The S series starting in the T460 I think is crap. Having the big honking
external battery is a must. The non S series are as big as the T450s were and
you get all your ports too. My T450s gets over 20hours battery life with the
extended battery.

That being said I wonder if you could get more life out of your T460s. Check
with powertop how many watts you use in idle. You should be able to get it to
3w (I can get mine t450s to 2.5w) idle. Use the turntables in powertop -- set
them to "GOOD", you can write a systems service to enable them on boot.

For me the key to saving battery life is to optimize how much you use when you
are not using your laptop.

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arendtio
I wonder when the first mainstream distribution will make Wayland their
default. So far, much time has been spent on that project and yet there is so
little normal users get to see it in action.

~~~
PerryCox
Fedora made Wayland the default already. [1]

[1]: [https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/f28/system-
admin...](https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/f28/system-
administrators-guide/Wayland/)

------
jchw
This is good news! I wonder how Ozone on Wayland is going nowadays, as it
would be nice to have both Firefox and Chrome booting in Wayland by default.

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lasagnaphil
Now only if NVIDIA would start working on GBM and support Wayland...

Many would say to just buy AMD, but the power consuption story isn’t that
great

~~~
vetinari
Nvidia is working on EGLStreams support in wayland compositors. They finally
got the memo, that the upstream projects won't work on their APIs, but accept
the patches.

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Markoff
that's all nice but what about basic features on Android as pull down to
refresh or rearranging top sites first?

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MrTonyD
Wish I could care about this more. But since the "scrapbook" add-on broke I
haven't updated. That may be my terminal release for the rest of my life
(since that page-saving add-on is my entire justification for using Firefox)

~~~
laurent123456
Why not switch to a note taking application with web clipper? It seems any of
them would have similar functionalities.

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zhte415
First, I was running Javascript on a server. Now, I'm running X in a browser.

