Firefox 77 on POWER

Firefox 77 is released. I really couldn't care less about Pocket recommendations, and I don't know who was clamouring for that exactly because everybody be tripping recommendations, but better accessibility options are always welcome and the debugging and developer tools improvements sound really nice. This post is being typed in it.

There are no OpenPOWER-specific changes in Fx77, though a few compilation issues were fixed expeditiously through Dan Horák's testing just in time for the Fx78 beta. Daniel Kolesa reported an issue with system NSS 3.52 and WebRTC, but I have not heard if this is still a problem (at least on the v2 ABI), and I always build using in-tree NSS myself which seems to be fine. This morning Daniel Pocock sent me a basic query of 64-bit Power ISA bugs yet to be fixed in Firefox; I suspect some are dupes (I closed one just this morning which I know I fixed myself already), and many are endian-specific, but we should try whittling down that list (and, as usual, LTO and PGO still need to be investigated further). I'm still using the same .mozconfigs from Firefox 67.

In a minor moment of self-promotion, I'm also shamelessly reminding readers that Fx77 comes out parallel with TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 23, relevant to Talospace readers because I made some fixes to its Content Security Policy support to properly support the web-based OpenBMC with System Package 2.00. Although the serial console-LAN redirector has some stuttery keystrokes, I think this is a timing problem rather than a feature deficiency, and everything else generally works. Connecting over ssh or serial port is naturally always an option, but I have to agree the web OpenBMC is a lot nicer and some tasks are certainly easier that way. If you're a long-term PowerPC dweeb like me and you want to use your beloved Power Mac to manage your brand-spanking-new Talos II or Blackbird, now you can.