Firefox snap with Wayland enabled by default in Ubuntu 23.10 (Mantic Minotaur)

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Hi folks,

Firefox snap now has Wayland enabled by default in Ubuntu 23.10 (Mantic Minotaur), the current Ubuntu development series.

Outside of Mantic, the Firefox snap currently still defaults to XWayland even when running in a Wayland session, as that is the most well-tested scenario. Switching Firefox snap to default to Wayland mode when running under a Wayland session in Mantic (which will be the next Ubuntu interim release) should help the Desktop team and Mozilla folks gather feedback and gauge the readiness of Firefox’s native Wayland support, ahead of the next Ubuntu LTS release.

If you are running Mantic, you can verify that your Firefox snap is running in Wayland by opening about:support, and searching for Window Protocol; it should be wayland.

If you are on other Ubuntu releases but would you like to try Firefox snap with native Wayland mode, you can run the following command in a terminal to switch Firefox snap to the wayland channel:

sudo snap refresh --channel=wayland firefox

If you encounter any issues please report them here or preferably on Bugzilla, Mozilla’s bug tracker. Please include in your reports the output from these commands:

snap info firefox
snap --version

Finally, to go back to the non-Wayland stable version of Firefox snap, you can run something like

sudo snap refresh --channel=stable/ubuntu-yy.mm firefox

where yy.mm is the Ubuntu release you are currently on. For example, if you are on Ubuntu 22.04, you would run:

sudo snap refresh --channel=stable/ubuntu-22.04 firefox
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Tested on Ubuntu Studio running Wayland under KDE Plasma.

Despite every other GTK app having all 3 window action buttons, it is for some reason missing minimize and maximize/restore. Close button appears just fine. I’m not sure what the cause of this is, but I’m fairly certain it’s a CSD issue.

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For snap specific bugs in Mozilla bug tracker is there a particular way to tag them?

I reported one that’s gotten no attention.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1851953

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Side effect: Wayland + Nvidia (535) is now ok in Firefox!
XWayland snap apps are still suffering… Thunderbird, VScode, etc.

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@eeickmeyer, that sounds very close to https://launchpad.net/bugs/2034724

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Very close, and I commented anyhow. That bug seems to suggest the issue comes and goes, and seems to be unrelated to Wayland. I’ll be doing further testing throughout the week, especially as beta approaches.

EDIT:
@vanvugt I did just test by switching to X11 on the same machine and it’s solely related to Wayland. The issue disappears when using X11.

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I wanted to try this wayland snap on my 23.04 system, but when I follow the directions above, it fails:

$ sudo snap refresh --channel=wayland firefox
error: snap "firefox" is not available on wayland/stable but is available to install on
       the following tracks:

       latest/stable  snap refresh --stable firefox
       esr/stable     snap refresh --channel=esr firefox

       Please be mindful that different tracks may include different features. Get more
       information with 'snap info firefox'.
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Indeed, the instructions are incorrect it seems, you can install the current stable version by using channel=stable/ubuntu-23.10 or the candidate one channel=candidate/wayland

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(The beta channel also uses Wayland (and has for a while): snap refresh --beta firefox.)

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Hi folks, just a quick update to note that the Firefox snap stable version 121.0-1.1 (released in December) and newer versions now use native Wayland everywhere when available (not just Ubuntu 23.10), and no longer default to XWayland. This was also announced in Mozilla’s release notes for Firefox 121: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/121.0/releasenotes/

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