Last year brought a wealth of new features and fixes to Firefox on Linux. Besides numerous improvements and bug fixes, I want to highlight some major achievements: HDR video playback support, reworked rendering for fractionally scaled displays, and asynchronous rendering implementation. All this progress was enabled by advances in the Wayland compositor ecosystem, with new features implemented by Mutter and KWin.
↫ Martin Stransky
It’s amazing how the adoption of Wayland is making it so much easier for application developers to support modern features like these. Instead of having to settle for whatever roadblocks and limitations thrown up by legacy X11 cruft, the Linux desktop can now enjoy modern features like HDR, and much more easily support features like fractional scaling. The move to Wayland, as long as it may have taken, has catapulted the Linux desktop from its ’90s roots right into the modern era.
It’s great to see Firefox implementing improvements like these for Linux users, but of course, they come with Mozilla’s push to make Firefox an “AI” browser, something few Firefox users seem to want. Luckily, the various Firefox variants like Librewolf and Waterfox will get these same features while removing all the “AI” bloat, so as long as Mozilla remains committed to Firefox for Linux – or Firefox in general – Linux users can rest safe.
Sadly, I’m afraid Mozilla’s massive pivot to “AI” isn’t going to work out, so I have no idea how long Mozilla will be able to afford Firefox on Linux development specifically, and Firefox development generally.
Switched Chromium->Firefox on my Linux machines last year
“like Librewolf and Waterfox will get these same features while removing all the “AI” bloat, so as long as Mozilla remains committed to Firefox for Linux – or Firefox in general – Linux users can rest safe.
Sadly, I’m afraid Mozilla’s massive pivot to “AI” isn’t going to work out, so I have no idea how long Mozilla will be able to afford Firefox on Linux development specifically, and Firefox development generally.”
Who knows how long they can do it, I do not care at this point in time they have burnt though all the goodwill they had with me. I have used that code since it was Mosaic, before it became Netscape, then the Phoenix a long GD time. I seen way too many user hostile changes in all of that time from them clowns at Mozilla and I am done with them. I went with the Waterfox as I was not interested in figuring out how to undo all the extreme paranoid changes of the Librewolf. This year is the year of change for me I just dumped the KDE people as well after close to 27 years of use on Linux, whenever the pre 1.0 version days were for their user hostile moves too mandating the garbaged supposed init system and wayland enough of them too. Soon if it keeps up it will be one of the BSDs for me. At least they seems to care about their users and not kissing some parasite corporate ass. Who knows perhaps people will continue to step up and actually support freedom in free software and continue to offer us choices not mandated garbage telling us how to use our computers.