Firefox on Linux update

It may look like Firefox development is stalled and frozen but nothing could be further from the truth. 22 300 patches landed in Firefox Mercurial repository since new year and we keep hacking 😀

Let’s look what’s new in Firefox on Linux and what could be interesting for Fedora users.

• Large WebRTC update was merged with DMABuf screen sharing and xdg camera portal support, both developed by Jan Grulich. It should speed up screen sharing via. portals (used by Wayland, Snap and Flatpak) and enable new webcams on Linux.
• VA-API was enabled for Intel GPU on Firefox 115.0. AMD is delayed due to various driver bugs but you can force enable it by setting media.hardware-video-decoding.force-enabled at about:config. VA-API state is printed at about:support page now.
• David Turner implemented video hardware decoding support for H.264 on a Raspberry Pi 4 via V4L2-M2M and there’s ongoing work to enable VP8/9 too. If you have an arm with HW video decoding, try it in next Firefox 116.0 (or recent Beta).
• Emilio Cobos Álvarez – fixed many Linux/Gtk style bugs like wrong colors, menu round corner rendering, titlebar rendering and also lots of Wayland bugs. He unified Firefox main window rendering on all desktops (we use client decorations – CSD – now) and have fixed regressions on desktops like XFCE/TWM.
  The style bugs are especially tricky ones as we removed X11/Wayland display connection from web content processes (due to security) and we can’t use native styles directly then.
• Firefox 116 allows you to create Wayland or X11 exclusive builds. It means you can build Firefox without X11 (or Wayland) dependency which saves space and resources. Also you don’t need anymore Wayland build to run DMABuf and VA-API backends.
• Mozilla started to implement Firefox tests on Wayland (along with testsuite migration to Ubuntu 22.04). It allows to ship Wayland backend by default with Mozilla binaries and Ubuntu/Snap and reduces regressions during development.
• Fedora ships Firefox 115.0 with PGO/LTO optimization again (built by GCC) after long period of breakage. Mozilla/clang builds are still a bit faster than GCC ones (Mozilla binaries give me ~ 200 points in Speedometer2.1 while Fedora ones ~ 190 points) but GCC binaries are slightly smaller (130 MB vs. 150 MB).
  
  But it’s still much better than non-PGO ones, Fedora Firefox 114.0 did only ~140 points in the benchmark.
  
  Just out of curiosity I tested Chrome browsers too. Fedora Chromium gives me ~140 points and official Google Chrome reached ~ 200 points. Looks like Fedora Chromium need some tweaks too :D.