Firefox 79 on POWER

Firefox 79 is out. There are many new web and developer-facing features introduced in this version, of which only a couple are of note to us in 64-bit PowerPC land specifically. The first is a migration of WebExtensions storage to a new Rust-based implementation; there was a bit of a pause while extension storage migrated, so don't panic if the browser seems to stall out for a few long seconds on first run. The second is a further rollout of WebRender to more Windows configurations, so this seemed like a good time to me to check again how well it's working on this side of the fence. With the Raptor BTO WX7100 installed in this Talos II, I've forced it on with gfx.webrender.enabled and layers.acceleration.force-enabled both set to true (restart the browser after) and worked with it all afternoon with no issues noted, so this time I'm just going to leave it on and see how it goes. Any GCN-based AMD video card from Northern Islands on up (the WX7100 is Polaris) should work. about:support will show you if WebRender and hardware acceleration are enabled, though currently no Linux configuration has it enabled by default.

Unfortunately, it turns out relatively few of us are like me where we build the browser ourselves from source, and it seems some distros are enabling features — most likely higher-level optimizations — that trigger broken builds on ppc64le (Ubuntu was mentioned by at least one user). It would be nice to whittle down the offending feature(s) they enabled, both to get local fixes to the distro package configurations and then look at why they don't work (or make the default not to enable them on our platform, solving the problem in both places). I suspect LTO and PGO are to blame, which have a long history of being troublesome, as well as various defects in gold (use GNU bfd as the linker instead). Meanwhile, the build I'm typing this blog post into locally is still happily running on the same .mozconfigs from Firefox 67.