Firefox on Unix is moving away from X11-based remote control

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/FirefoxNoX11RemoteControl

by signa11 • 5 years ago

109 174 5 years ago

utcc.utoronto.ca

I've run into the mentioned issue often when an X application in XWayland will fail to open a link in my Wayland Firefox process. I hope they resolve it soon, but I've updated Nightly since this article was written and it still happens, so it looks like not yet. Maybe my installation wasn't built with the necessary flags.

yuri912• 5 years ago

oh yes! this is the single most frustrating thing on Wayland for me right now (not a huge deal, but almost anything else just works these days).

Jnr• 5 years ago

I remember there being a variable that you can pass that fixes it for Firefox.

yuri912• 5 years ago

I dug a bit on this just now, and apparently you can force firefox to use dbus always by setting the env variable MOZ_DBUS_REMOTE=1 . Finally I can click to links in slack instead of copying them.

jacobmischka2• 5 years ago

Thank you very much!

mftb2• 5 years ago

Hmm... I had this working, but then it stopped. I think I have that variable set all over the place, but I must not... or something. Must investigate! (I'm on Wayland/Sway)

marcellus23• 5 years ago

Is it the year of Linux on the desktop yet?

tyingq• 5 years ago

I suppose you could leverage the Firefox remote agent protocol that things like puppeteer use and make yourself a wrapper that emulates the behavior that was deprecated.

I had a somewhat similar situation with WSL where I wanted xdg-open to open Chrome tabs in Windows instead of WSL. Was able to get that working with just WSL->Windows built-in functionality and a *.desktop file.

snthd• 5 years ago

Does that mean you can send links to different instances of Firefox under different profiles, or even particular windows (eg sending a link to the same screen/workspace as the programming passing the URL)?

Historically I think the last Firefox to open received all the link-opening requests.

tomohawk• 5 years ago

I always start firefox with `-no-remote` to avoid having it talk with other firefox's

emersion• 5 years ago

Using X11 as some kind of client-to-client IPC was really just a hack in the first place.

tacostakohashi• 5 years ago

Not really, that is the intended purpose of X11 properties after all.

_lqaf• 5 years ago

...A 'hack' the system was designed around, sure.

Why do you think it has the odd server-client architecture in the first place?

yissp2• 5 years ago

I suspect trying to maintain a remote-X11-based workflow is going to become increasingly annoying as more applications prioritize the Wayland / Xwayland use-case like Firefox has done here.

azalemeth• 5 years ago

I'm very ignorant about Xwayland – but I frequently use "ssh -Y" or "ssh -X". Is there a simple alternative?

Will this move break lots of things needlessly? The wayland / X debate is one of those things that I fear will become a bit like vim vs emacs...

amarshall• 5 years ago

Waypipe https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/

capitainenemo3• 5 years ago

I'm still a big fan, personally, of ssh -YC - it works pretty efficiently with Eclipse and other simple GTK text based apps.

With Firefox, it doesn't work as well, and I can understand why. Browsers demand a lot of graphics acceleration. That said, you can still get decent performance by force-enabling xrender as long as they still support it.gfx.xrender.enabled;true

Personally, gonna be a bit sad when Wayland breaks all my things (my xdotool scripts, my ssh -YC, my XSDL on Android)

pessimizer• 5 years ago

vim vs emacs

Is that actually something to fear? They're both available and active, and systems don't depend on either of them being installed.

b112• 5 years ago

Firefox cares little for user experience, constantly alienating its user base over, and over again.

They are notorious for being the least user friendly of browsers, and that is surely saying a lot.

So taking this as any sort of trend, isn't prudent.

tannhaeuser2• 5 years ago

Idk if you can say that. Using Wayland may very well give better UX after all.

My prob with Wayland is more like, as shitty and 80s X may be, it's the one stable API that almost all F/OSS desktop apps and quite a couple highly specialized apps are developed against. The risk is loosing it all, especially as new desktop aren't coming in this millennium.

1MachineElf• 5 years ago

I worry about how this trend could impact BSDs which typically rely more on FireFox (and derivatives) as a modern browser. Neither Wayland nor Dbus are native to those systems.

md8z28• 5 years ago

What exactly does "native" mean on BSD here? In my experience, that usually just means something that is written in C, uses BSD make, uses the BSD license, and follows some patterns used in the BSD libc. Which seems to apply to very little popular desktop software including Firefox and all other web browsers.

BSD users seem to be fine with running ports though, which include Firefox, D-Bus and Wayland.

zajio1am2• 5 years ago

Hmm, so it would not work on systems without DBus? If that is unix app, why not just use unix socket?

viraptor• 5 years ago

Dbus is available on most systems now. I don't know what's the reason for the authors, but in practice with UNIX socket, you have issues like "which instance owns the socket", "how are the requests distributed", "how does an instance know the current handler died", "how to serialise and version the remote requests", etc. Dbus solves a lot of that without (effectively) designing your own custom underspecified version of half of dbus.

zajio1am2• 5 years ago

but in practice with UNIX socket, you have issues like "which instance owns the socket", "how are the requests distributed", "how does an instance know the current handler died"

While bus-based publish-subscribe paradigm may have some merit in desktop setting, for direct control the client-server is much more straightforward, and in this case these answers are easy. Each instance owns one socket, if there are multiple instances and not a default one, a client needs to know which to connect to (as they are generally not interchangable), and even if they are, a client can just enumerate sockets and open the first alive.

"how to serialise and version the remote requests"

These issues are irrelevant for connection-oriented and reliable unix sockets.

Dbus solves a lot of that without (effectively) designing your own custom underspecified version of half of dbus.

Not really. Connection-oriented client-server solution is just much simpler that dbus and offers some advantages like implicit state associated with connection. Dbus makes things much more complicated and then solves some of these complications.

jmclnx• 5 years ago

I am curious about this too. On OpenBSD I set

export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS="no"

to avoid Firefox from starting dbus, which is a Linuxism ported to BSD just to allow people to execute some applications. That works fine for me.

So since this is removed and Firefox is the only app that I use which needs dbus, I wonder if I will be required to use yet another useless (ie: not needed by OpenBSD) process just to use Firefox.

phone8675309• 5 years ago

It's weird watching the Linux development community go from the position that Windows apps tightly coupling to Windows was bad because it made those programs more of a pain to run under Linux (most of the time requiring Wine) to deciding that sticking with cross-UNIX platforms was just no longer worth their time because Linux "won" the UNIX wars.

rjsw• 5 years ago

I build Firefox without dbus for NetBSD, current version works fine.

md8z28• 5 years ago

I would be really interested to know why people seem to think D-Bus is a "Linuxism". It's a pretty small daemon with an Apache-style license and upstream support for BSD. The only thing I've heard are comments like this where people find that D-Bus is required to run some GTK or Qt application, and those toolkits are viewed as being "Linuxisms", so people put it in that bucket transitively. Is there another reason I missed here?

bitwize7• 5 years ago

No, it wouldn't, because why would you run a system without dbus? That's just silly.

yissp2• 5 years ago

Can you use Wayland without DBus? I guess in theory yes, but in practice most compositors rely pretty heavily on it for various other things.

guerrilla3• 5 years ago

Does Sway use D-Bus? I would not guess that. Enlightenment? I have hard time seeing that.

guerrilla3• 5 years ago

It says if it's built with D-Bus, so presumably you can still just build it without it for now.

MayeulC• 5 years ago

Another approach would be to integrate Firefox-specific D-Bus proxying inside of waypipe.

Have waypipe listen to where Firefox normally does, if one is spawned on the remote host.

I can imagine this being useful for more things, like portals going forward: one could imagine forwarding sound, video (both trough pipewire, negociated over D-Bus) and files this way.

johnklos• 5 years ago

Makes perfect sense - stop using X11 because XWayland needs to be fixed.

bitwize7• 5 years ago

Actually it does make perfect sense because X is deprecated by the community and largely abandoned except for XWayland, which is kept around for legacy apps only. Update your workflow to the modern stuff, don't expect the maintainers to keep supporting your use case from decades ago.

superkuh2• 5 years ago

X is deprecated by the community and largely abandoned

Old and functional does not mean deprecated. In most distros and for most users X is not deprecated.

It sounds like you've been living on the bleeding edge for a long time and have lost touch with the reality of linux for most users. The GUI toolkits like Gtk and Qt fully support X. They do not fully support Wayland. When this changes you can call X deprecated.

Asooka• 5 years ago

Ah yes, surely if we break the entire world again, this year will be the year of the Linux desktop.

The Linux desktop experience is a bit like watching an alcoholic. You try to explain that drinking is making them sick and they should stop, but they just get violent and drink even more.

I think the success of Windows should be proof enough that you can keep compatibility for very old APIs and that it's required for an OS that is to be a platform for other people to build software on, as opposed to a walled garden (Apple) where you sometimes let people build part of it.

markstos• 5 years ago

Sounds like he was considering re-inventing SSH tunneling, which is built-into SSH.

solarkraft• 5 years ago

It’s really nice to see X11 slowly die out.

yjftsjthsd-h2• 5 years ago

Somewhat less nice for those of us who are using it and don't appreciate people trying to break our setups.

iso8859-1• 5 years ago

Software breaks itself simply by being unmaintained. If people were serious about Xorg, it would see more activity.

selfhoster11• 5 years ago

Aye, I love suddenly not having X forwarding through SSH. Oh, wait.

jdlyga• 5 years ago

X11 and Wayland is like when the previous API is deprecated, but the new API is in beta

bravetraveler2• 5 years ago

I find it hard to disagree - and I'm (finally) on a full Wayland setup (that's honestly pretty stable/good -- Sway for anyone curious)

The amount of 'lift' involved was absurd. Half of the applications I launch need tickled/informed that Wayland is in use.

If I don't do this, most of these things default to XWayland and copying/pasting between that and native things is absolutely broken (often one direction)

Taywee• 5 years ago

I'm in a similar boat as you. I switched from X11 to Wayland (also Sway) and from PulseAudio+Jack2 to Pipewire a couple weeks ago. I am in the extra difficult boat of doing it on a high DPI display (I assume you aren't, or you would have mentioned it, given how annoying it is to get everything working). GDK_DPI_SCALE, ELM_SCALE, QT_SCALE_FACTOR, MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND, QT_QPA_PLATFORM, XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP, XDG_SESSION_TYPE and a few other things are necessary to get everything working.

Then you have little things like having to do xdg-desktop-portal to do screencasting, little nits like not being able to screen-share a window at a time (only a full desktop). It's definitely not a super easy and comfortable transition at the moment. I'd recommend most anybody who wants to do it use a DE that takes care of as much of the pain as possible, like modern Gnome or something. Sway itself is nice. I've never used i3, but I've used Awesome for like a decade, so Sway is not a big jump.

Moving to Pipewire was really easy, on the other hand. Mostly drop-in, and I had some annoying audio issues both with PulseAudio and Jack2 that Pipewire completely fixes for me. I absolutely love it, and feel like Linux audio is in an acceptable place for the first time in my life.

edit: oh, and before Firefox 93, I had to force Firefox to run in X11, because extension popup windows were broken on Sway due to a Firefox bug. Much of the testing for Wayland applications is done only on Gnome.

yeetaccount3• 5 years ago

X is like trying to fly modern rockets with Apollo-era computers. The computers will work, until they don’t. In which case the only people able to fix them are retired and you have to salvage parts from aerospace museums. Over the years the cruft of replacement parts has accumulated and no one person can really understand the whole thing anymore, and entire sections are not understood and nobody remembers why they’re there or really what they do (but if you get too close to it the lights go off in certain important corner cases).

Wayland is the shiny new SpaceX module that brings a lot of improvements but needs to have its toilet fixed.

tablespoon3• 5 years ago

X is like trying to fly modern rockets with Apollo-era computers. The computers will work, until they don’t. In which case the only people able to fix them are retired and you have to salvage parts from aerospace museums. Over the years the cruft of replacement parts has accumulated and no one person can really understand the whole thing anymore, and entire sections are not understood and nobody remembers why they’re there or really what they do (but if you get too close to it the lights go off in certain important corner cases).

And often the response to that it to rewrite it in something "modern," like Electron.

I feel the appropriate response to a situation like you describe is put in the work to figure the existing thing out rather throw it away and put the work to building and debugging a replacement. It's less sexy, but it's the right thing to do.

Now it would be an entirely different matter if the old system could not longer provide adequate performance, etc. I'm only addressing the "it's old and only understood by olds, therefore replace" thought process.

hyproxia• 5 years ago

Most people who criticise X like you have no idea what they're talking about. The parallels you're drawing are childish and indicate an extremely shallow understanding of the issues at hand.

josephcsible• 5 years ago

Why couldn't this have instead been fixed by having Firefox listen on both, and then having remote control check X11 first and then if it didn't find it there, then fall back to D-Bus? Wouldn't that have fixed the problem that motivated the change, but without breaking the use case with X11 forwarding?

m45t3r• 5 years ago

It seems for me that this remote control using the X based protocol was never meant to be a feature. Probably the mechanism was created before D-bus existed, was meant to be dropped once a better solution was created, but never was done until now.

If anything else, D-bus seems to be the proper protocol for something like this, since as the author itself said, it is simpler and more reliable.

dragosmocrii4• 5 years ago

Don't know why, but Firefox on my Ubuntu is slow AF. Scrolling pages is just a pain. Graphics acceleration seem to be enabled.. Chrome is buttery smooth though, so no idea how to fix FF

guerrilla3• 5 years ago

Make a thread on Ask Ubuntu or the forums and try to get help figuring out the cause?

capitainenemo3• 5 years ago

What version of Firefox? Graphics acceleration may be enabled in X11 but not in Firefox. Check the about:support page for status of that in the Graphics section. Last year I believe they enabled it by default in Linux due to improved driver stability, but there is still a blacklist. Chrome and Firefox both have blacklists, each with different card strings in it.

Over here it is: Compositing WebRender (I have layers.acceleration.force-enabled;true and gfx.webrender.all;true)

There's a far less common problem where you are running firefox in XRDP or ssh -YC and it is being sluggish - for that you have to force-enable xrender https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1263222 )

dragosmocrii4• 5 years ago

All the flags to force using acceleration are enabled, but the section with the Graphics driver shows that no driver was found. I do have the latest Nvidia Drivers installed, and my graphic card is a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Mobile.

* Running Firefox 93.0

*Update: I've rebooted my system, and it shows that my Graphic Card is now in use. Not sure which flag I enabled helped, but pages are buttery smooth as with Chrome. Many thanks!

lambdaba2• 5 years ago

Maybe it's because FF isn't configured to run with wayland? Check "window protocol" in about:support and make sure to run it with the MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 env var.

dragosmocrii4• 5 years ago

My system runs on X11 though

sp332• 5 years ago

You could try disabling acceleration and see if that helps. Sometimes there are just driver issues.

ATsch• 5 years ago

Very glad to hear this, the X11 mechanism has been causing issues for me for a long time, as detailed in the article.

short12• 5 years ago

I hear all the pushback on Wayland with boastful claims about x11

X11 has been crap since I started exclusively using Linux in 1998

Is junk, it's unstable, slow and bloated. Why people grasp onto the network aspect is beyond me. The model is horrendous and outdated and little used at that. Better alternatives have blown x forwarding out of the water years

marginalia_nu2• 5 years ago

I've personally never experienced any problems with X11. What exactly are its problems?

Being old isn't always a bad thing, quite the contrary, often times the things get old is by being quite good and working well.

evmar• 5 years ago

At least as of >10 years ago when I worked on the code, the equivalent feature in Linux Chrome uses a unix socket in your Chrome profile directory. It was a little subtle to implement in that you need to also handle the case where a crashed browser leaves a socket behind.

Firefox on Unix is moving away from X11-based remote control

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