Penguins get their Wayland with Firefox 121 Version 121 of Mozilla's Firefox web browser, released yesterday, has changes that affect Linux, Windows, and Mac users differently. Unusually, this release has three different new features on the three main platforms it supports, and all of them depend on the configuration of your local machine. There are some changes that …
It does have a couple of things which are still being argued over. Luckily Wayland was built to support different features as "protocols" so it is easy to extend without breaking anything.
An example missing feature is that Wayland does not let windows position themselves - a big issue for a bunch of scientific apps which typically spawn multiple windows next to each other for their UI. Wayland did not want to support absolute positioning. Philosophically applications should not assume what hardware and screens a client has, nor be able to override behaviors a user wants. Real-world issues with pop-over ads / spyware also suggest that apps should not have the right to position themselves.
There is a decent proposed protocol to allow this in a way which also keeps the benefits which seems to be OK, just needs to be codified and agreed. See https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/264 if you are interested.
An example missing feature is that Wayland does not let windows position themselves - a big issue for a bunch of scientific apps which typically spawn multiple windows next to each other for their UI.Not only those, but other kinds too. Above all (IMO), VB/Delphi-style IDEs, of which there are still several around (Free Pascal / Lazarus being the first that comes to mind). Probably a lot of others too, that I don't know of.
The common denominator between them all is that you'd usually want all windows to resume their previous positions when you reopen a project... And that would have to be handled by the application.
In my opinion the mere fact that this hasn't even occurred to the Wayland developers until now is a sign of their utter shortsightedness. (To be honest, feels pretty much like the only thing they've cared about so far is GNOME, and the whole mentality feels eerily similar.) And the fact that they didn't fall all over themselves in gratitude and immediately accepted the first version of this suggestion by, wossname, Mathias Klump?, is even worse. Just fricking ridiculous.
If I weren't so utterly above any hints of paranoia I'd think the whole idea of Wayland was just another stepping-stone in Red (Blue!) Hat's quest to turn Linux into their proprietary OS.
I've been doing this with a client-side stylesheet extension for 15 years. Stylesheets for Low Vision does it too. And then the web designers fight back at us by hiding their navigation behind clickable Javascript controls instead of normal hyperlinks. They are absolutely determined to stop us from figuring out how to use their websites aren't they.
Wayland shmwayland ... but, seeing how ElReg's World Famous FOSS Desk may have hopscotched over last month's FF120 announcement, I think it's worthy to restate here that Mozzarella's Firefox now enables WebAssembly Garbage Collection (WasmGC) by default. For the one LISPER out there in the audience, this means that you can now give a Hoot, and finally run Scheme, in Scheme, in Firefox! ( https://spritely.institute/news/scheme-in-scheme-on-wasm-in-the-browser.html ).
That should make the last 30 years of acme computational advances all-of-a-sudden look like we were all just standing still!
[Author here]
> ElReg's World Famous FOSS Desk may have hopscotched over last month's FF120 announcement
TBH I tend to write about roughly every _other_ version.
> Mozzarella's Firefox now enables WebAssembly Garbage Collection (WasmGC) by default.
Interesting. I would have thought that GC was more of a feature of the language than of the runtime, but I've not dug far into WASM yet. (I personally tend to regard it as a horribly inefficient reimplementation of Inferno's Dis, in the wrong place in the stack.)
> That should make the last 30 years of acme computational advances all-of-a-sudden look like we were all just standing still!
That sounds fun. More of this sort of thing, please.
"Although this is a valuable accessibility feature for those with disabilities affecting the use of their arms or hands, it's also useful if your arms work but are busy, for instance while working in a wet or messy environment, and being able to drive Firefox this way could be very handy."
I saw what you did there. El Reg is still El Reg. Long may it reign.
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