Penguins get their Wayland with Firefox 121
- Reference: 1703075287
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/12/20/firefox_121_released/
- Source link:
Unusually, [1]this release has three different new features on the three main platforms it supports, and all of them depend on the configuration of your local machine.
There are some changes that affect everyone, though. Billed as an accessibility feature, it's now possible to tell the browser to always underline hyperlinks, regardless of the page designers' wishes. In the integrated PDF viewer/editor, a new trashcan button makes it easier to delete objects added to the document. Webmail users can [2]set Firefox as their email client , and under the hood there are also [3]changes in rendering that may affect web developers.
Windows wonks get more efficient video
On Windows machines, Firefox will now automatically install [4]Microsoft's own version of the new AV1 video codec. We [5]described the format thus:
AV1 is a relatively new codec that has a lot of people excited, in part because it's royalty free, but also because it's exceptionally space efficient.
Various tests have shown AV1 to be anywhere from 20 to 40 percent more efficient when compared to popular web streaming codecs, including H.265.
Mac mavens get the power of voice
On macOS, Firefox 121 now supports Apple's [6]Voice Control feature . Voice Control appeared in macOS 10.15 "Catalina" in 2019 and allows macOS to be controlled using spoken commands. Although this is a valuable accessibility feature for those with disabilities affecting the use of their arms or hands, it's also useful if your arms work but are busy, for instance while working in a wet or messy environment, and being able to drive Firefox this way could be very handy.
[7]Google pencils in limited third-party cookie purge for January
[8]Wayland takes the wheel as Red Hat bids farewell to X.org
[9]Firefox slow to load YouTube? Just another front in Google's war on ad blockers
[10]Mozilla tells extension developers to get ready to finally go mobile
(As an aside, Voice Control is one of two entirely separate macOS features that can turn spoken words into text, alongside the older and separate [11]macOS Dictation functionality which has been around for a decade or more. This is oddly parallel to the situation over on Microsoft Windows, which also has two separate and independent speech-driven interfaces: [12]Windows Speech Recogition , which works in Windows 10 and 11, and the newer [13]Voice Access introduced in Windows 11.)
And penguin pesterers get native Wayland support
Firefox is the go-to web browser on most Linux distros, and here, if you are already running a Wayland-based desktop, Firefox 121 will render direct to Wayland without using the XWayland server.
Wayland is the next-generation display server protocol for Linux (and FreeBSD) desktops, which has [14]gained major ground this year . Even [15]version 5 of the Raspberry Pi OS uses it by default. Now Firefox natively talks the Wayland protocol to your compositor, a feature that has been around for a while but was turned off in most distros.
[16]
This is not purely a performance enhancement. It means better handling of trackpad and touchscreen gestures, such as pinch-to-zoom, sharper less blurry text on hi-DPI displays, and better handling of different DPI settings if you have more than one display and use different scaling factors on them.
[17]
In theory, though, it should offer faster rendering and less tearing. We attempted to benchmark it on Ubuntu 22.04.03, using the built-in snap-packaged version of Firefox, but the browser repeatedly crashed. However, in fairness, we had to force-enable Wayland because of an elderly GPU which needs version 390 of the Nvidia binary driver, so this isn't a supported or recommended config, and we don't think it reflects on Firefox at all.
Don't panic. If you're using a traditional X.org-based desktop, such as Xfce, Unity, or MATE – in fact, basically anything other than recent versions of GNOME and KDE Plasma – or any of the distros that doesn't use Wayland, such as Linux Mint, then the new Firefox will still render to X11, the same as ever. ®
Get our [18]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/121.0/releasenotes/
[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-enterprise-121-release-notes
[3] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Releases/121
[4] https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9MVZQVXJBQ9V?hl=en-us&gl=US
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/13/accelerators_streaming/
[6] https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/use-voice-control-commands-mh40719/mac
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/14/google_schedules_limited_thirdparty_cookie/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/29/rhel_10_dropping_x11/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/21/ad_block_google/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/03/mozilla_android_extensions/
[11] https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/use-dictation-mh40584/14.0/mac/14.0
[12] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-speech-recognition-commands-9d25ef36-994d-f367-a81a-a326160128c7
[13] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/get-started-with-voice-access-bd2aa2dc-46c2-486c-93ae-3d75f7d053a4
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/13/wayland_is_coming/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/03/raspberry_pi_os_5/
[16] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZYMduBEIf6kVi0iAxoP2AwAAAAw&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[17] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZYMduBEIf6kVi0iAxoP2AwAAAAw&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[18] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Wayland the World is Going*
It does have a couple of things which are still being argued over. Luckily Wayland was built to support different features as "protocols" so it is easy to extend without breaking anything.
An example missing feature is that Wayland does not let windows position themselves - a big issue for a bunch of scientific apps which typically spawn multiple windows next to each other for their UI. Wayland did not want to support absolute positioning. Philosophically applications should not assume what hardware and screens a client has, nor be able to override behaviors a user wants. Real-world issues with pop-over ads / spyware also suggest that apps should not have the right to position themselves.
There is a decent proposed protocol to allow this in a way which also keeps the benefits which seems to be OK, just needs to be codified and agreed. See https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/264 if you are interested.
tell the browser to always underline hyperlinks
As was always intended... fed up with having to wave a mouse over a page to find a subtly different shade of gray on pale gray is actually a link. I suppose that's what they meant with 'discoverability'.
Re: tell the browser to always underline hyperlinks
I've been doing this with a client-side stylesheet extension for 15 years. Stylesheets for Low Vision does it too. And then the web designers fight back at us by hiding their navigation behind clickable Javascript controls instead of normal hyperlinks. They are absolutely determined to stop us from figuring out how to use their websites aren't they.
Re: tell the browser to always underline hyperlinks
Except in very rare cases, I simply won't click on a Javascript control that conceals an actual target.
Like a long car trip as a kid
Are we there yet?
It also comes with built in adverts that float over forms. for some other Mozilla services.
...
https://qoto.org/@falken/111602319913744006
[Author here]
> It also comes with built in adverts that float over forms. for some other Mozilla services.
OMG. I am short of fully working arms as it is, but at the best of times I do not have enough of them for *this* much facepalming.
Gcwasm
Wayland shmwayland ... but, seeing how ElReg's World Famous FOSS Desk may have hopscotched over last month's FF120 announcement, I think it's worthy to restate here that Mozzarella's Firefox now enables WebAssembly Garbage Collection (WasmGC) by default. For the one LISPER out there in the audience, this means that you can now give a Hoot, and finally run Scheme, in Scheme, in Firefox! ( https://spritely.institute/news/scheme-in-scheme-on-wasm-in-the-browser.html ).
That should make the last 30 years of acme computational advances all-of-a-sudden look like we were all just standing still!
Re: Gcwasm
[Author here]
> ElReg's World Famous FOSS Desk may have hopscotched over last month's FF120 announcement
TBH I tend to write about roughly every _other_ version.
> Mozzarella's Firefox now enables WebAssembly Garbage Collection (WasmGC) by default.
Interesting. I would have thought that GC was more of a feature of the language than of the runtime, but I've not dug far into WASM yet. (I personally tend to regard it as a horribly inefficient reimplementation of Inferno's Dis, in the wrong place in the stack.)
> That should make the last 30 years of acme computational advances all-of-a-sudden look like we were all just standing still!
That sounds fun. More of this sort of thing, please.
Good that Wayland support is being turned on by default now—been using it for a while with the 'MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1' environmental variable and haven't had any real issues with it.
Wayland the World is Going*
Looks as if Wayland is beginning to shape up at last. Does it still have any major flaws?
*With apologies to HG Wells.