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Chromium To Support Wayland

Posted by Unknown on from the moving-on dept.

sfcrazy writes "Chromium developers have started porting Chromium to X11 alternatives such as Wayland. Tiago Vignatti sent a message to the freedesktop mailing list, 'Today we are launching publicly Ozone-Wayland, which is the implementation of Chromium's Ozone for supporting Wayland graphics system. Different projects based on Chromium/Blink like the Chrome browser, ChromeOS, among others can be enabled now using Wayland.'"

30 of 61 comments (clear)

  1. Mir is a dud by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    LOL, no one wants to use Mir. Isn't it about time Canonical just sticks a fork in it, admits they were wrong and just start working with upstream instead? Yeah, yeah, who am I kidding. Canonical's culture is based almost entirely on NIH and being a leech.

    1. Re:Mir is a dud by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I like XMir quite a lot

      How so? What is anything that XMir does better than X?

    2. Re:Mir is a dud by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Because many of us used to really like Ubuntu before the whole thing got fucked to hell, and XMir is yet another step in the horrifyingly wrong direction.

    3. Re:Mir is a dud by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Because Canonical doesn't have the resources to finish it off properly. So we will end up with the same result as Unity (i.e a steaming pile of suck) , used by no-one other than Ubuntu users and only then because its mostly forced on them.

      Canonical need to choose one or two projects and stick with them. Right now they have a new project every other week all of which never come off properly, mean while their user base slow dwindles.

    4. Re:Mir is a dud by DrXym · · Score: 2
      XMir is rootless X running on Mir. I don't see that it makes much difference to any desktop X11 app if it was that or XWayland instead. I expect most apps will run happily over either providing the extensions they use are present and functioning. Over time it is likely that desktop apps will bypass X entirely because GTK/QT will favour the Wayland (or Mir?) backend if one is available and suitable for the invocation.

      I think the issues for Ubuntu is they seem more interested in the mobile device space than the desktop and for whatever reason have decided that Wayland is not how they want to get there. It's very hard to see what their fundamental objection actually is. The Ubuntu site vaguely mentions related to input and root but these really don't seem insurmountable to me. At the very least Mir should be a fork that addresses those issues while closely tracking the mainline of Wayland. Perhaps in time it would win support. But they didn't do that.

      The licencing is even more divisive. They've GPLv3'd Mir which in principle sounds fine but Ubuntu own the copyright and only accept contributions from people who sign the CLA and turn over copyright to Ubuntu. So Ubuntu can can relicence it any way they like but competitors are emasculated by the GPLv3. This isn't a problem in desktops but it most certainly is in the world of phones and tablets. That might explain why Intel dropped Mir like they did.

    5. Re:Mir is a dud by gl4ss · · Score: 1

      Because Canonical doesn't have the resources to finish it off properly. So we will end up with the same result as Unity (i.e a steaming pile of suck) , used by no-one other than Ubuntu users and only then because its mostly forced on them.

      I'm fairly sure that Unity is EXACTLY what they set out to make. too bad they set out to make a steaming pile of shit engineered to make people type in what they want so that they can get a copy.

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    6. Re:Mir is a dud by Merk42 · · Score: 1

      ...Canonical's culture is based almost entirely on NIH and being a leech.

      Aren't those two exact opposites?

    7. Re:Mir is a dud by CadentOrange · · Score: 1

      ...Canonical's culture is based almost entirely on NIH and being a leech.

      Aren't those two exact opposites?

      There you go ruining someone's rant by applying logic.

  2. Re:Don't encourage them by BanHammor · · Score: 2

    That's not Canonical, actually. That's RH and X developers.

  3. Re:Don't encourage them by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 2

    And Intel.

  4. the big question by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 2

    will it actually increase the overall speed of the browser?

    --
    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
    1. Re:the big question by hobarrera · · Score: 1

      I don't think that's the actual goal. The goal is to maintain Ozone-* as middleware between chromium and *, so they don't need to rewrite each feature for X11, Wayland, Mir, etc.
      In truth, since development times SHOULD shrink, this may free up devs to work on other features that make the browser run faster - or not.

  5. RLZ Tracking by odie5533 · · Score: 1

    Let me know when they remove RLZ Tracking and maybe I'll start to trust them as a web browser.

    1. Re:RLZ Tracking by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Then good news! Unless your hardware or drivers are crap, you've loaded Firefox with a ton of crappy addons, or you're delusional, Firefox doesn't really freeze like that very often! But no, no, no.. I forgot. It's easier to randomly say Firefox is inherently an inferior product than it is to own up to Chrome's flaws. When you have nothing to say, just redirect the argument. It's so easy!

    2. Re:RLZ Tracking by flimflammer · · Score: 1

      Nothing of what you mention has ever been in Chromium.

    3. Re:RLZ Tracking by odie5533 · · Score: 1

      Chromium has no software updater. I either have to download a separate add-on that gives me an icon when an update is available, or I have to check their website for updates. And I still need to download and install them. Or I could use an external program to automate some of that. A giant hassle just to keep it updated.

      Chromium is still brought to you by the people that brought you RLZ Tracking. Also see https://github.com/nylira/prism-break/issues/169

      Obviously it's a great web browser. But its greatness is from the same reason that I avoid it: Google.

    4. Re:RLZ Tracking by flimflammer · · Score: 1

      So I can then safely assume your initial post was just karma whoring, seeing as how the issue you initially discussed really didn't matter at all when considering its worthiness to you?

  6. A bit of NIH, but also a lot of pure naïvet&# by Phil+Urich · · Score: 5, Informative

    To be fair, some of the behaviour that's been seen has been down to underlying bugs in the Xorg drivers that were never triggered under normal use but are hit by XMir. Others are down to implicit assumptions made in the drivers that XMir happens to violate. The problem is that there doesn't appear to have been enough room in the schedule to deal with these interactions, presumably because nobody accounted for the inevitable "This thing we thought would be easy turns out to be difficult" part of the project.

    Source: Matthew Garrett, The state of XMir

    --
    I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
  7. Re:More fragmentation? FANTASTIC. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I see "fragmentation" is as high in the "Things most slashdotters don't really understand, but use for cheap karma shots anyways" ranking as always, near "patent claims, prior art and obviousness", "Betterdige's law of headlines" and "security by obscurity".

    Seriously, could you elaborate on what gets "fragmented" here, and how it helps with things "going their way"?

  8. Re:Niche? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    By simply asking that question it is clear that you don't know what Wayland is or does. I suggest you start with their FAQ. But in summary Wayland is a repacking for X11 or xorg and all the packages you listed run on top of Wayland not instead of it.

  9. Re:I can predict the future! by petteyg359 · · Score: 1

    I didn't know loud and annoying Harley riders did that...

  10. Re:Too Much Integration by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Right, because a browser doesn't need to know how large its viewport is, or how much space is available to arrange its title bar and menus, or how to send or receive signals to or from the DM when it is minimized or restored or resized, or any of that kind of silly thing. Multi-tasking operating systems are so out of style...

  11. Re:Too Much Integration by bmarkovic · · Score: 2

    Except that TFA clearly states they are porting Ozone (their graphics toolkit, as they're not using Qt Gtk or anything else) to Wayland.

    Common missunderstanding is that Wayland is a display server. It is not. It's a protocol that UI toolkits use to talk to the compositor (KWin, Weston etc.).

    I'm pretty sure that Canonical, by now, are more or less certian they will need to provide for apps to talk Wayland to Mir as not everyone will be using one of the big UI toolkits that talk to Mir directly. To those apps, Mir will be just another compositor.

    And I don't mean Google, Google is pragmatic enough and has manpower to port Ozone to Mir as well.

  12. Recent (daily) builds by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    It would be nice if they started to maintain a up-to-date ppa for ubuntu. After all it is a contestant for the standard browser for ubuntu. In my recollection the same thing is true for the windows version. If you want the most recent version you have to build it yourself. Which is ridiculous for a piece of software for which it is absolutely crucial to be up-to-date.

  13. Not compared to accelerated X? by dutchwhizzman · · Score: 2

    It may improve scrolling speed and other compositing functions, compared to unaccelerated graphics drivers. However, Chromium is known to have quite a decent openGL and 2D accelerated X interface already. I think this question should be read as: "Will wayland offer benefits as decreased power usage or better acceleration, compared to using X11?". In that case, I think we will probably have to say it isn't at that point in the foreseeable future.

    --
    I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
    1. Re:Not compared to accelerated X? by Dwonis · · Score: 1

      "Will wayland offer benefits as decreased power usage or better acceleration, compared to using X11?".

      Based on playing around with Weston for a weekend, I think it'll get there sooner than you might think. Wayland's developers are familiar with Xorg, so they're not wasting a lot of time with NIH-syndrome rewrites of stuff that works (for instance, Weston uses the same low-level video drivers as Xorg, and xwayland is just a special build of Xorg). The protocol is specifically designed to take "frames" into account (so, no more tearing, ever), so even if it's somewhat slower (which I don't expect), it'll *feel* more responsive.

      Flash in Chromium/X11 under xwayland already renders video more smoothly on my machine than it does on native Xorg (well, when rendering doesn't hang or crash xwayland). If you cut out some of the middlemen, I expect it'll only get better.

    2. Re:Not compared to accelerated X? by jones_supa · · Score: 1

      "Will wayland offer benefits as decreased power usage or better acceleration, compared to using X11?"

      Wayland will be simpler and faster than X11 and thus also result to decreased power usage.

  14. Re:A bit of NIH, but also a lot of pure naïve by dkf · · Score: 2

    the inevitable "This thing we thought would be easy turns out to be difficult" part of the project

    Ah yes, the part also known as the second 90%...

    --
    "Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
  15. Re:Too Much Integration by bmarkovic · · Score: 1

    No, Aura/Ozone is the toolkit (Aura being the widget/chrome layer, and Ozone lower level graphic layer).

  16. Re:The real purpose by Dwonis · · Score: 1
    It all runs through an open-source compositor, which can render the video wherever it wants. Wayland even has "frames" built into the protocol; This is in order to avoid tearing, but it would also make it easier to re-encode the video at the correct frame rate.

    Remote X11 never really worked properly anyway; It doesn't survive interruptions, and it's basically unusable over high-latency connections (you end up needing to use things like VNC). Network transparency is a nice feature, but X11 embedded it into the wrong layer, and it doesn't really work very well today anyway. Building a VNC server (or maybe something more rich based on streaming video) should be a lot easier under Wayland than it ever was under X11.