Firefox 121 Is Looking Good For Having Wayland Enabled By Default

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Firefox 121 Is Looking Good For Having Wayland Enabled By Default

Firefox 121 is aiming to ship with Wayland support enabled by default rather than falling back to XWayland on modern Linux desktops. So far things are looking up for this indeed remaining the case for next month's Firefox 121 stable release...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-121-Wayland-Good

[cl333r]

That would be 16 years after Wayland was started. That's still sooner than Gnome's weird plans from the past.

[primary]

That would be 16 years after Wayland was started. That's still sooner than Gnome's weird plans from the past.

I still cannot understand why they would get rid of tray icons. Makes no sense for me.

[rmfx]

That would be 16 years after Wayland was started. That's still sooner than Gnome's weird plans from the past.

Yep… I hope the protocol’s design holds for the next 30 years because if the next transition also takes 20 years, it’s gonna be a mess.

[user1]

I wonder if at some point in the far future, Wayland will also reach a state when it will be "too hard to maintain it" just like x11. I mean I'm sure it won't be as bad as x11, since it was designed differently, but still, more and more protocols are adding up each year.

[Azrael5]

The end of an era and the beginning of another one. Wayland powered by Vulkan will last for long long time.

[Zajec]

I think it's worth to mention one newly supported CSS selector: :has()

[ezst036]

When FF 121 arrives it would be nice to see some fresh Firefox vs Firefox vs Firefox vs Firefox benchmark comparisons. (older versions, some Wayland some not)

[stargeizer]

I wonder if at some point in the far future, Wayland will also reach a state when it will be "too hard to maintain it" just like x11. I mean I'm sure it won't be as bad as x11, since it was designed differently, but still, more and more protocols are adding up each year.

Old and grumpy uncle stargeizer here...

The main problem with X11 is a product of it's time: 1984 (my prime time BTW). Designed to be portable and to run on hardware of the era, where the PC didn't exactly existed, when COMMODORE and ATARI ruled the world, and terminals stil were a thing. And yes, the dino-computer was still a thing at that time (Punch-card computer)

Now, you might ask: What do this have to do with X11??. A lot. Since back at the time, software review wasn't a thing. Software makers in most cases were a one army show, or at most 2 or 3 people show. Open source was born, and most of these projects were done by the "trust everyone" principle. There were no real bad intentions or bad people back then, so everything was valid. These were the days. CVS was a novelty back then. And X11 wasn't the exception. Now comes the time Linus Torvalds put online his famous "hobby OS work" and BANG!!!.

Then we reach 1992, year where Xfree86 was born, which was an implementation of X11 (can't remember X11R5 or R6??) and was an attempt to bring a clean and modularized codebase from the old code developed for the old machines, to the x86 architecture. Hint: it didn't work as planned.

Now, what happened?. To explain better, there's a game that can literally explain better: Katamari damacy:

The main problem is that during it's heyday, X, Xfree86 and later xorg, the katamari was unmanageable. For the 2 or 3 people still alive on the earth that knows most of the knobs of the katamari, i believe their main wish is to have the sheer terror of code exorcised from their minds. And TBH, there are the real heroes of the story, since they didn't run screaming from the problem, like normal people would do.

Now, in plain english: Back then to remove support for some architecture, they only removed the "knobs" and the compiller directives that such architecture required. In most cases, the old main code for such architecture was still there, interacting with the newer code added, inside several C files. For years.

Now, is 2008 and Kristian Høgsberg saw this, understood that write an extension to X11 would be futile, when the core implementation still expects hardware from 1980 to work properly. Hence Wayland was born.

Now, in 2008 hardware was pretty different from hardware from 1984. In 2008. video interfaces doesn't support lines and primitives anymore and everything has to be written using triangles. 8 and 16 bit colors were a thing of the past and 3DFX demise already happened years ago.

So the heroic efforts to modernize the X server as Wayland started.

Unfortunately, backwards compatibility is a thing, and the old will always fight the new. Microsoft learned it the hard way with windows NT 3.51. Since then, they just did their own katamari: Since windows 95, they include all the code of the older OS to maintain Backward compatibility. That's why the size of their OS grew over time: (from 130 Mb in windows 95 to 20 Gb in windows 10 in the name of Backwards compatibility). Also Linus Torvalds knew well this problem when he said "If a user relies on a bug, is not a bug anymore: It's a Feature". That's why (i believe, maybe Daniel Stone will have another opinion) development (AND ADOPTION) of wayland is still at glaciar pace.

Honestly, i wouldn't worry to much about the future: We're reaching the limits of the sillicon, and we're pretty close to the midnight of the Doomsday clock, so probably it won't matter ina few years.

[cynic]

I still cannot understand why they would get rid of tray icons. Makes no sense for me.

I believe that's one of the consequences of the no-distraction-desktop philosophy.
After all those years I still can't decide if I like it or not, but for sure since Gnome 3 my working experience is much improved due to this choices.