Firefox 84 Rolling Out With WebRender By Default Appearing For Some Linux Setups

For those making use of the Firefox web browser, Mozilla has an early Christmas present with today's release of Firefox 84. Most significant with Firefox 84 is for Linux users that WebRender is finally getting flipped on by default for select system configurations.

While WebRender has been slowly appearing by default on other platforms, with Firefox 84 there is Mozilla finally flipping it on for some Linux systems. WebRender by default is initially appearing on if running Firefox from the GNOME desktop and doing so off an X11 session rather than Wayland. More widespread enabling of WebRender on Linux by default will likely appear once they have further tested additional configurations. Those interested can continue to force enable WebRender elsewhere via the MOZ_WEBRENDER=1 environment variable.

Firefox 84 also includes native support for Apple Silicon (Apple M1 ARM64) hardware and is also the final browser release to support Adobe Flash. With Adobe EOL'ing Flash, Firefox is saying farewell with this final version supporting it. There are also several developer / web API improvements as outlined at developer.mozilla.org.

Those using the generic Firefox binaries can find today's Firefox 84.0 build at Mozilla FTP.