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Comment by sambe | Hacker News Reader

Shipping for Linux is waaay down the list:

https://github.com/orgs/FirefoxGraphics/projects/1

I assume due to driver issues?

As a desktop Linux user, I'd guess it's harder to make it work right (because of, among other things, driver issues) and it affects a smaller portion of the user base of Firefox. Oh well.

Fortunately it's easy to opt in to, and in my experience works well on an oldish Intel chip.

Unfortunately, it fails hard with Wayland, putting no pixels on the screen. (In my experience) But I'm using it happily through XWayland.

I tried it for a while and it worked fine but I did notice that it significantly increased idle CPU load, enough to affect battery life

> Unfortunately, it fails hard with Wayland, putting no pixels on the screen. (In my experience)

It works for me in nightly, at least. Have you tried there?

Nightly user with a Radeon, running Sway on Wayland and Firefox with Webrender. Been working quite nicely for some months now already.

No, only tried on stable. Looking forward to testing 67 when I get the update.

I should clarify that I am talking about the situation when running Firefox with GDK_BACKEND=wayland.

UPDATE: Ooh! Firefox 67 in my package manager! I am happy to report that I am now able to use Firefox with WebRender on Wayland directly. One glitch so far: It leaves a one-pixel row transparent at the bottom of the screen. Weird :)

FWIW, WebRender is enabled by default on Nightly on Linux with a subset of modern Intel hardware.

Seeing as Linux Firefox still doesn’t use any hardware acceleration, it’s probably because there’s no developer room for it.

It doesn't use it by default, but you can manually enable it. It's the only way I could watch twitch streams on a 1440p monitor at 60 FPS.

There are plenty of developers using Linux, though. Time for someone to jump in?

Not only. There's Ubuntu Linux/Fedora Linux/Arch Linux, there's Wayland and a whole slew of compositors...

As always, the solution would be to not attempt to support "Linux", but to pick one distribution (or a manageable set) to support officially.

Distro shouldn't matter one bit. Just scan for hardware acceleration support and enable it if found. Plenty of other applications do this without any per-distro changes.

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