Firefox 72 on POWER


Firefox 72 builds out of the box and uneventfully on OpenPOWER. The marquee feature this time around is picture-in-picture, which is now supported in Linux and works just fine for playing Trooper Clerks ("salsa shark! we're gonna need a bigger boat!"). The blocking of fingerprinting scripts should also be very helpful since it will reduce the amount of useless snitchy JavaScript that gets executed. The irony of that statement on a Blogger site is not lost on me, by the way.

The bug that mashed Firefox 71 (ultimately fallout from bug 1601707 and its many dupes) did not get fixed in time for Firefox 72 and turned out to be a compiler issue. The lifetime change that the code in question relies upon is in Clang 7 and up, but unless you are using a pre-release build this fix is not (yet) in any official release of gcc 9 or 10. As Clang is currently unable to completely build the browser on ppc64le, if your extensions are affected (mine aren't) you may want to add this patch which was also landed on the beta release channel for Firefox 73.

The debug and opt configurations are, again, otherwise unchanged from Firefox 67.

Comments

  1. Couldn't get 71.x and 72.x built on Arch POWER yet. During `mach install` shlibsign fails using either the integrated or system provided NSS. Bit at a loss but maybe you ran into this in the past?

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    Replies
    1. This is on Fedora, though I'm sure Arch is similar. However, I just do a regular './mach build' rather than 'install'.

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