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.

Firefox, VA-API and NVIDIA on Fedora 37

Some time ago I got borrowed NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 from my employer (Red Hat) and I finally managed to put it to a workstation instead of my own AMD RX 6600 XT. I installed proprietary drivers from rpmfusion and to my surprise everything worked smoothly (except Atom on XWayland). Both Wayland and X11 Gnome

Firefox with VA-API for brave Fedorans

It’s been a long journey since the first VA-API implementation in Firefox. Two years ago Firefox 77.0 come to Fedora with accelerated video playback on Wayland which was more a tech preview than a working solution. Since then X11 support was added, fixed many bugs, AV1 decoding was implemented so we can claim VA-API code

Firefox on Fedora finally gets VA-API on Wayland.

Yes, it’s finally here. One and half year after Tom Callaway, Engineering Manager @ Red Hat added the patch to Chromium we also get hardware accelerated video playback for Firefox. It’s shame it took too long but I’m still learning. The VA-API support in Firefox is a bit specific as it works under Wayland only