Firefox Lands Wayland Fractional Scaling Support | Hacker News Reader

Firefox Lands Wayland Fractional Scaling Support

phoronix.com

Isn't there already fractional scaling support for wayland? I'm using sway and always used "MOZ_WAYLAND_ENABLE=1" and firefox always ran under native wayland without blur (like on XWayland).

Fonts rendered correctly but I was having issues with WebGL textures rendering a bit blurry.

We'll see if this fixes it.

My understanding is that basically all clients were scaling to the next highest integer factor, and then rescaling back to the fractional size. With this, and support in the toolkits, it should be possible to be more efficient and have more accurate rendering.

But yes, I have a keyboard shortcut that can change the scale of my entire desktop up or down in .1 increments. It's one of my favorite Linux things because macOS and Windows sure as hell can't come close to working that well with arbitrary scale factors.

macOS definitely but Windows has actually had equally an equally good per display fractional scaling API for much longer and apps like Firefox have been supporting it for many years now.

I'm a huge Wayland (swaywm) fanboy myself and I'm excited about these changes but there is still more in the Wayland pipeline I'm eagerly waiting for so Linux catches up and surpasses macOS/Windows e.g. HDR (which is something Firefox has also been slower on). I think the fractional stuff is all in "about as good as one could ask the display server to do" state for Windows and Linux at this point, the rest is apps adopting it like we see here.

Rescaling is extremely efficient and not a problem. The reason macOS doesn't support arbitrary DPIs is because it's so hard to design the UI correctly to avoid things like pixel cracks; if you make everything to look like a website, don't use bitmap images, etc it's possible though.

Instead it has dynamic type, which changes text sizes but not the rest of the UI scale.

This is not about Wayland support. It is about "true" fractional scaling support via the protocol mentioned in the article, instead of apps rendering at integer scales and then the compositor scaling them down to achieve a fractional overall factor. I guess this should make fonts look better and save some resources.

Thanks, good to see that Wayland gets some love, I guess I never had any problems with how Firefox looks, but I don't mind if it removes one layer of "abstraction".

If you didn't have fractional scaling enabled for your monitor, then you wouldn't have noticed a difference.

I do have it enabled, that's why I notice a difference between XWayland and Wayland, otherwise I don't think I would have ever searched for the environment variable.

My understanding is that downscaling basically throws away the effects of font hinting and of any type of algorithm aligning glyph edges to the pixel grid to make them look sharper.

So depending on the user's personal tastes, their vision, their monitor's DPI and the font rendering algorithms used, the difference might range from clearly perceptible to none.

At hidpi scales, you don't do font hinting or align to pixel grid. The resolution is high enough, so it is not needed to distort glyph shapes.

Sad to say, Wayland just isn't ready for prime time. Like Achilles and the tortoise, it's just not achievable for X to ever be overtaken.

I'm not sure why people think that. I been using sway since the early days. I don't even have xwayland installed. It's been mostly a non-issue.

The only real pain for me was screen sharing, and that's been a solved problem for a few years now.

A software that gets almost no commits, which devs all now develop Wayland and won't get any modern features is never going to be overtaken?

Last year x had [156](https://www.phoronix.com/news/XServer-2022-Development-Pace#....) commits that's almost as low as in 2003. On its high in 2008 it had over 2000.

X is dying. All the development is on Wayland. Even the maintainers of x think it is an unmaintainable mess, which they do not understand. They either quit or work on Wayland. How long does a software need to be on life support to be overtaken?

Read [this](https://www.phoronix.com/review/x_wayland_situation) and you might understand why x got abandoned

You'd expect less commits on a mature, full-featured product. That repairmen are always working on a car is no endorsement of its functionality.

Do you realize we are discussing such things here, that X doesn't support at all?

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