Chromium To Support Wayland

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.'"

Comments

Mir is a dud

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Mir is a dud

[Anonymous Coward]

I like XMir quite a lot

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

Re:Mir is a dud

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Mir is a dud

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Mir is a dud

[DrXym]

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.

Re:Don't encourage them

[BanHammor]

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

Re:Don't encourage them

[Lunix Nutcase]

And Intel.

the big question

[Gravis Zero]

will it actually increase the overall speed of the browser?

A bit of NIH, but also a lot of pure naïvet&#

[Phil Urich]

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

Re:Too Much Integration

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Too Much Integration

[bmarkovic]

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.

Not compared to accelerated X?

[dutchwhizzman]

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.

Re:A bit of NIH, but also a lot of pure naïve

[dkf]

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%...