Mozilla Might Finally Enable Firefox's Wayland Backend Soon

While some Linux distributions like Fedora and Arch are enabling the native Wayland back-end for Firefox by default, upstream Firefox continues to not enable this Wayland support as part of their default builds. But -- at long last -- that might finally change soon.

Martin Stransky of Red Hat who is known for his Firefox work on Fedora today outlined the Firefox Linux improvements made last quarter. He mentioned that the "Wayland backend is gaining momentum at Mozilla upstream."

While those running Wayland currently with the official builds will find Firefox running through XWayland, he's sounding hopeful that might soon change. Mozilla is migrating their test suite to run on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and as part of that there is now Wayland testing. Martin mentions "let's hope we see Wayland in release soon."

There's this bug tracker for the status of shipping the Wayland back-end for Firefox releases. Mozilla's Sylvestre Ledru commented last week that he's in favor of going ahead with the change as long as it's documented properly.

So as we near the end of 2023 or going into early 2024, it's looking like we're nearing the point of finally having native Wayland support with the upstream Firefox builds. Martin also outlined in his Q3 Firefox Linux status blog post that dbus-glib has also been dropped as a build dependency for Firefox, Firefox supports a new kiosk mode, there is a new idle monitor/service implemented, and other Linux improvements.