Firefox on Wayland update

As a next step in the Wayland effort we have new fresh Firefox packages [1] with all the goodies from Firefox 63/64 (Nightly) for you. They come with better (and fixed) rendering, v-sync support, and working HiDPI. Support for hi-res displays is not perfect yet and more fixes are on the way – thanks to Jan Horak who wrote that patches.

The builds also ship PipeWire WebRTC patch for desktop sharing created by Jan Grulich and Tomas Popela. Wayland applications are isolated from desktop and don’t have access to other windows (as X11) thus PipeWire supplies the missing functionality along the browser sandbox.

I think the rendering is generally covered now and the browser should work smoothly with Wayland backend. That’s also a reason why I make it default on Fedora 30 (Rawhide) and firefox-x11 package is available as a X11 fallback. Fedora 29 and earlier stay with default X11 backend and Wayland is provided by firefox-wayland package.

And there’s surely some work left to make Firefox perfect on Wayland – for instance correctly place popups on Gtk 3.24, update WebRender/EGL, fix KDE compositor and so on.

[1] Fedora 27 Fedora 28 Fedora 29

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Thunderbird 60 with title bar hidden

Many users like hidden system titlebar as Firefox feature although it’s not finished yet. But we’re very close and I hope to have Firefox 64 in shape that the title bar can be disabled by default at least on Gnome and matches Firefox outfit at Windows and Mac.

Thunderbird 60 was finally released for Fedora and comes with a basic version of the feature as it was introduced at Firefox 60 ESR. There’s a simple checkbox at “Customize” page at Firefox but Thunderbird is missing an easy switch.

To disable the title bar at Thunderbird 60, you need to go to system menu Edit -> Preferences and choose Advanced tab. Then click at Config Editor at page left bottom corner, open it and look for mail.tabs.drawInTitlebar. Double clik on it and your bird should be titleless 🙂

Fedora Firefox – GCC/CLANG dilemma

After reading Mike’s blog post about official Mozilla Firefox switch to LLVM Clang, I was wondering if we should also use that setup for official Fedora Firefox binaries.

The numbers look strong but as Honza Hubicka mentioned, Mozilla uses pretty ancient GCC6 to create binaries and it’s not very fair to compare it with up-to date LLVM Clang 6.

Also if I’m reading the mozilla bug correctly the PGO/LTO is not yet enabled for Linux, only plain optimized builds are used for now…which means the transition at Mozilla is not so far than I expected.

I also went through some Poronix tests which indicates there’s no black and white situation there although Mike claimed that LLVM Clang is generally better that GCC. But it’s possible that Firefox codebase somehow fits better LLVM Clang than GCC.

After some consideration I think we’ll stay with GCC for now and I’m going compare Fedora GCC 8 builds with the Mozilla  LLVM Clang ones when there are available. Both builds can’t use -march=native so It may be an equal comparsion. Also Fedora should enable the PGO+LTO GCC setup to get the best from GCC.

[Update] I was wrong and PGO+LTO should be enabled also for Linux builds now. The numbers looks very well and I wonder if we can match them with GCC8! 🙂