Firefox Wayland By Default On Gnome

Summary

Firefox is going to run natively on Gnome Wayland session and won't use XWayland/X11 Gtk+ backend by default. The XWayland/X11 Gtk+ backend can be still used via additional firefox-x11 package. This change affects Gnome only and won't be enabled for other Wayland compositors (KDE Plasma, Sway).

Owner

Name: Martin Stransky

Email: <stransky@redhat.com>

Release notes owner:

Product: Spins / Workstation

Responsible WG: Desktop

Current status

Targeted release: Fedora 31

Last updated: 2019-03-18

Tracker bug: #1678453

Release notes tracker: #301

Detailed Description

Firefox with native Wayland backend has been available for last two Fedora releases as an optional package. It grown over the time and we can deploy it now as a default to bring all Wayland benefits to Fedora users.

Benefit to Fedora

Running Firefox natively on Wayland is generally faster and smoother on Wayland enabled sessions like Gnome Wayland and better supports HiDPI displays (respects desktop scale) .

Scope

Proposal owners: Firefox already uses Wayland as a default backend on Fedora 30 / Gnoma Wayland session.

Other developers: N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Release engineering: #Releng issue number (a check of an impact with Release Engineering is needed) List of deliverables: N/A (not a System Wide Change)



Policies and guidelines: N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)

Upgrade/compatibility impact

N/A (not a System Wide Change)

How To Test

N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Run Firefox on Gnome Wayland session and check any issues you may see.

User Experience

Faster Firefox run on Gnome Wayland session

Smoother font rendering compared to non-Wayland Firefox version

Honor display scale, better user experience on HiDPI and semi-HiDPI desktops.





Dependencies

N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Contingency Plan

Contingency mechanism: Switch back default X11 backend.

Contingency deadline: Beta Freeze

Blocks release? No

Blocks product? product No

Documentation

Mozilla Firefox Wayland Bug tracker: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635134

Mozilla release calendar: https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar

N/A (not a System Wide Change)