Firefox: tips & tricks

marav · 06-26-2023, 07:21 AM

Mozilla Firefox 116 To Allow For Wayland-Only Builds

Code:

Another exciting milestone has been reached on Mozilla's long journey of improving the native Wayland 
support for the Firefox web browser on Linux.

With the Firefox 116 release, it will now be possible to enable Wayland-only Linux builds of Firefox. 
To this point even if caring just about Wayland support, the X11 dependencies have still been pulled 
into the Firefox builds. But now it's possible with the latest Firefox development code to specify 
"cairo-gtk3-wayland-only" if wanting to exclusively support Wayland without all the baggage of X.Org.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefo...w-Wayland-Only

hazel · 06-26-2023, 08:01 AM

This may be a bit off-topic but can anyone tell me why my Firefox tabs occasional mutate into separate windows? I find this behaviour very annoying.

There must be some key that I am accidentally pressing, but I have no idea what it might be.

elcore · 06-26-2023, 11:51 PM

@hazel this is true by default, but fixable in prefs.js or user.js

Code:

user_pref("browser.tabs.allowTabDetach", false);

hazel · 06-27-2023, 04:46 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by elcore

@hazel this is true by default, but fixable in prefs.js or user.js

Code:

user_pref("browser.tabs.allowTabDetach", false);

I don't have a user.js file and that option doesn't occur in my prefs.js. Is it OK to just put it in?

What I'd really like to know though is what triggers the unwanted behaviour.

EDIT: OK, I found it in about:config and toggled it there. So now it can't happen any more. Thank you.

Petri Kaukasoina · 06-27-2023, 05:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hazel

why my Firefox tabs occasional mutate into separate windows?

Click and hold a tab and slide it a little down. Or move it between some other tabs of another firefox window. I use it a lot.

hazel · 06-27-2023, 05:14 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Petri Kaukasoina

Click and hold a tab and slide it a little down. Or move it between some other tabs of another firefox window. I use it a lot.

Ah, now I understand. My hand must have slipped when I was clicking on a tab to make it current. Easy enough to do if you are old.

elcore · 08-02-2023, 02:26 AM

News from 15.0 /testing/ packages:
firefox-115.0.3esr now identifies blackbox as a desktop environment, where previous versions reported "unknown".
Here, about:support now reports this:

Quote:

Desktop Environment - blackbox 0.77

So now there's at least some hope that GNOME will not be the only officially supported environment.

elcore · 08-18-2023, 06:18 AM

Something changed fairly recently with how firefox uses alsa device.
Previously, audio/video playback in firefox took control over the device, and denied other applications access to device.
Now, video playback in firefox works without taking exclusive control over the device and the system now allows audio playback from 2 sources at the same time.
This is without libpulse BTW, not sure if firefox changed something or alsa stack changed to support multiple outputs.
Packages used for testing:

Code:

mozilla-firefox-115.1.0esr-x86_64-1_slack15.0

Code:

alsa-lib-1.2.9-x86_64-2_alsa
alsa-plugins-1.2.7.1-x86_64-2_alsa
alsa-utils-1.2.9-x86_64-2_alsa

marav · 10-13-2023, 06:44 AM

Mozilla Might Finally Enable Firefox's Wayland Backend Soon

Code:

While some Linux distributions like Fedora and Arch are enabling 
the native Wayland back-end for Firefox by default, upstream Firefox 
continues to not enable this Wayland support as part of their default builds. 
But -- at long last -- that might finally change soon.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefo...-Possibly-Soon

marav · 11-06-2023, 11:09 AM

Mozilla Firefox Development Finally Moving Entirely To Git

Code:

MOZILLA
"FIREFOX DEVELOPMENT IS MOVING FROM MERCURIAL TO GIT," began the email 
today from Mozilla announcing Firefox is finally shifting over to Git!

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-Going-Git

cwizardone · 11-14-2023, 06:15 AM

Quote:

Firefox Is Going To Try And Ship With Wayland Enabled By Default
By Michael Larabel. 13 November 2023.
Guardrails have been in place where the Firefox browser has enabled Wayland by default (when running on recent GTK versions) but as of today that code has been removed... Firefox will try to move forward with stable releases where Wayland will ship by default! ................

The full story can be found at, https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefo...ayland-Release

marav · 12-05-2023, 06:18 PM

Firefox on the brinks?

Code:

A somewhat obscure guideline for developers of U.S. government websites 
may be about to accelerate the long, sad decline of Mozilla’s Firefox browser

https://www.osnews.com/story/138011/...-on-the-brink/

chrisretusn · 12-06-2023, 02:14 AM

I don't know if it's on the brink or not but I access one site (government) I need to access I get this:

Quote:

Our website has detected that you are using an unsupported browser that will prevent you from accessing certain features. An update is not required, but it is strongly recommended to improve your redacted experience.

The current list of browsers supported by redacted includes:
• Chrome 72 or later
• Edge 80 or later

So far no issues with site usage.

zeebra · 12-06-2023, 04:22 AM

If you want to run Firefox under Wayland, as oppose to xwayaland, use this..

Code:

export MOX_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1

After, or anytime, you can check what window protocol Firefox is using by going to "about:support" in Firefox.

Personally I found this well worth it, as performance (on an older machine) is notably better on Wayland than on xwayland. This especially applies if you are interested in hardware acceleration in Firefox, but should be the same generally.

jmccue · 12-06-2023, 09:05 AM

I forgot about this thread, so here is a tip I have this buried in another thread.

If you are using an old style Window Manager (twm, vtwm, mwm...) and have "AutoRaise" enabled, you may have noticed issues with Menus in Firefox. How to fix is noted below. This came from the vtwm mail list. FWIW, for me, fvwm works fine without doing this since its autoraise is a module.

In Firefox go to "about:config"
set "widget.gtk.grab-pointer" equal to "1"
Restart Firefox

This corrected the issue for me.