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
ladybug has reached higher compliance than chrome or gekko. This year will the the year when ladybug takes off among linux users. Windows users? maybe never, and it is not a mobile browser so the engine might work on iphone by 2066?
I am not sure about “higher” compliance but it is hard to find a site that it will not render (slowly at least). It is not all that far behind Safari on the Web Platform Tests suite. And on the website https://html5test.co it is now scoring above 500. Firefox is under 550.
It is certainly looking realistic to me that they could have something real people may consider using by mid-year. Even if it does not “take off” right away, I am excited to have it as an option.
And while Windows is still not an official target, I have seen more and more work on the Windows port in the commits.
Servo is further behind in what it will render. But t is coming along as well. It will be good to have options.
“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.
Hey Thom, a recent update broke mouse wheel functionality on Osnews. When I use ublock to filter all js on the site, the mouse wheel works as expected. When I disable ublock for osnews (as I usually do), the mouse wheel crawls, rather than flies.
Blocking just the inline scripts on the page works. It’s not about cloudflare or ko-fi or whatever I guess.
Thom – this may be related to the mouse wheel issue, but on Android, scrolling is now completely broken in both Firefox and Chrome on OSnews. You can’t scroll down on the home page or on individual articles. It works fine if you force the desktop version to load, but the mobile version is unusable.
When I found this Android bug, I discovered that you can scroll if you use TWO FINGERS, which is actually almost kind of fun.
Ha, thanks! It’s a bit jumpy, but it works in a… *pinch*.
It’s broken on Chrome desktop, the scroll wheel does nothing. I have to use the scroll bars like its 1995.
wayland and easier in the same sentence. Good work though.
Also ‘catapulted into the modern era’ haha, more like sidestepped into a primitive husk of a GUI where everything is an extension and nothing works except a permission system that makes sure nothing works.
What is the actual use case for HDR? I guess it need to be supported because it’s now A Thing, but the only use case I can see for it is making the video unnecessarily super bright compared to everything else for some reason. I hate watching HDR video on my phone because the brightness just looks ridiculous.
Use case? Errm, watching pictures of things the way they really are? We had text-only displays, we had monochrome graphics, then 4 color graphics, then more and more colors. HDR is current way of displaying pretty pictures.
zdzichu,
IMHO the ability to capture photographs with HDR is useful for the same reason the ability to capture audio with 24bit ADC – way easier to map input ranges to digital ranges without risk of distortion/overflow and it provides more data to adjust levels for mastering without having to interpolate between values. After post-processing keeping such high precision becomes less important for the output.
Obviously we use 8 bits for RGB color components because it’s convenient for our computers to work with bytes and not because it’s optimal for our eyes. 10bits would have probably been better, but the next natural unit for computers is 16bits. The value proposition of adding more bits largely depends how much brightness you want/need. I can perceive colors that are brighter than the brightest whites on my monitor, which is much dimmer than the sky or a light bulb for example, partly because I choose to run the monitor in energy saving mode. It’s not really pleasant to look at such bright sources for prolonged periods even though I can perceive their brightness. So do I need to be able see equivalent brightness on screen for ultimate realism? I suppose gaming or living room scenarios could benefit from super bright lighting to heighten the experience. It should be noted that IRL many people where sunglasses to decrease the light levels. So if monitors reflected reality ironically we might end up with people looking at their computer screens through sunglasses, haha.
Luke McCarthy,
This is a bit tangential to HDR content but I find that phones need to be exceptionally bright otherwise they get drowned out by sunlight as the iris in our eyes close and blocks more light. However in a normal room I’d agree it’s too bright. While most phones have an auto-adjust feature for brightness, on my phone it doesn’t work very well and I end up needing to adjust it depending on ambient light.