Wayland support in Pale Moon?

[miroR]

Hi!
I'm experiencing issues in Pale Moon that I believe are due to Xorg poorly working with Wayland.
I'm running Debian Testing, so mostly, what I run these days, will, with often only minor and sporadic changes, be iin Debian Stable in a couple of months.
Issues that I have are diverse, from menubar not dropping down on either clicking or keybord keys typing, to websites not showing content, such as, since recently, I can't watch videos on Rumble, at all.
I trust Pale Moon more than other browsers, but if Wayland is not going to be supported, a lot of Linux users, not just me, will have to use other browsers instead.
Are there any plans to support Wayland in Pale Moon?
I'm not a dev. Not really. I can do some programming, but not much at all. Else I would try and see if I could contribute.

[vannilla]

Wayland support comes down to GTK, but GTK 4 and beyond are unsuitable for Pale Moon.
Ideally you'd also make this bug report to whoever is managing XWayland, but given the massive push towards eliminating XWayland altogether I wouldn't hold my breath. Still, you should probably go ask there too, maybe they can give more insights.

[miroR]

Wayland support comes down to GTK, but GTK 4 and beyond are unsuitable for Pale Moon.
Ideally you'd also make this bug report to whoever is managing XWayland, but given the massive push towards eliminating XWayland altogether I wouldn't hold my breath. Still, you should probably go ask there too, maybe they can give more insights.

Sad to hear that.
Thanks anyway!
Ah... Not sure I can set aside so much time...
Here it goes if anybody else would like this matter improved.
For Debian/(and Ubuntu and other Debian-based systems):
This is the start point:
https://packages.debian.org/stable/x11/xwayland
Then under "Debian Resources" one can go to:
"Bug Reports", whcih opens:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgrepo ... t=unstable
And that is way more that I can find time myself to look into...
There's also "Ubuntu xwayland package":
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xwayland

A plethora of bugs in any case.

Regards, folks!

[Moonchild]

There are no plans for native Wayland support.
What we can and do support is GTK2 and GTK3 on X11 and through the XWayland compatibility layer.

There are plenty of reasons for this, but most importantly:

• Wayland is (still) not feature-complete, is not a stable standard, and its very nature makes it exceedingly hard to provide native support for.
• We have a lot of grandfathered, existing, highly-optimized layout and rendering code in Goanna that isn't easily extensible with additional rendering pipelines.
• We do not have the manpower or expertise to write an entirely new rendering back-end for Wayland.
• Even if we would be able to get basic Wayland support in, it would not be performant and would be outperformed greatly by the already-existing rendering support, making it an undesirable choice for end users.

If you are having rendering issues with non-X-native APIs and interfaces, you can try to disable XRender in about:config. This will then switch rendering and compositing to some OpenGL Voodoo instead, which may work better (but no promises).

[miroR]

There are no plans for native Wayland support.

I see.

If you are having rendering issues with non-X-native APIs and interfaces, you can try to disable XRender in about:config. This will then switch rendering and compositing to some OpenGL Voodoo instead, which may work better (but no promises).

I've just done it, and if this helps I'll report back. I assume it may take a while, especially since it's late at night in Europe.
Regards!

[andyprough]

but given the massive push towards eliminating XWayland altogether I wouldn't hold my breath

Actually it's a very mild push to not include xorg or xwayland by default and only by IBM/RedHat/Fedora. Which almost no one outside the Pale Moon devs uses as a graphical workstation anyway, at least nearly no one I've spoken to over the last 20 years. And even then Fedora and RedHat and their free-as-in-beer clones should continue to package xwayland in their repos for the next decade or three, because they have zero choice if they want to support the tens of thousands of legacy applications that their customers are using and which will never be rewritten as native Wayland applications.

[moonbat]

I'm on KDE Neon, which uses Wayland by default. No issues with Pale Moon or anything else.

[miroR]

but given the massive push towards eliminating XWayland altogether I wouldn't hold my breath

they have zero choice if they want to support the tens of thousands of legacy applications that their customers are using and which will never be rewritten as native Wayland applications.

Yup, I hope so. Because it means I will be able to use the browser that I trust for some years to come.
Namely, things are actually better that it may look to a casual browse that happened to read this topic from the start. I'll explain.
Firstly, I'm watching Rumble videos (currently: https://rumble.com/v5lzyfb-live-election-night-2024-coverage-and-results-11524.html ) without issue, as well as I've been browsing https://x.com/, https://www.newsmax.com/ (including watching their live tv), other live streams, also watching Yewtu.be (not youtube.com which is google's and which I dispise, but use https://redirect.invidious.io/ and watch "their" videos from some of that instance, in this case https://yewtu.be/watch?v=-DA30muqTPU) and also live streams and all.
How come the difference from how it was at the beginning of this topic?
Because unfortunately, I had compiled palemoon-33.1.1.linux-x86_64-gtk2.tar.xz with Debian Testing latest GCC and G++ (CC and CPP) packages, see https://developer.palemoon.org/build/linux/ in mid-September, 5 or 6 weeks ago or so which, the GCC was 13.x I believe.
Two or three days ago I found time and compiled:

Code: Select all

33.4.1 (64-bin) (GTK2)

with, this made the differnce, as per the linux compilation guide just given, with the recommended:

Code: Select all

11.x 	Recommended 	Mid-term tested. Currently in-use for MCP Applications.

So, the:

Code: Select all

export CC=gcc-11
export CXX=g++-11

(the above is to my best remembering, I am not at the computer where I compiled it right now), and the rest as per that guide, so that is probably why I have no issues anymore with this newly complied Pale Moon.
Thanks for the great browser, which I am confident is trustworthy. Of all other browsers that I know, I only trust Firefox to some extent, to some extent only, not completely by any means, with all the Normandy and stuff, which means with the level of control that is given to other subjects who are not the user of the Firefox instance, i.e., Pale Moon is the browser that I trust is not doing such stuff.
I am not an expert to elaborate on Normandy and similar stuff in Firefox though, so I'm giving just a hint here.

Thanks for the great not-used-for-surveillance browser!