Firefox 102 on POWER


Firefox 102 is out, not an earth shattering release but with some welcome privacy improvements. It builds out of the box on this Talos II using the PGO-LTO patch from Firefox 101 and the .mozconfigs from Firefox 95.

Firefox 102 is also the basis for the next Extended Support Release, with support for 91ESR (the current version) due to end on September 20 with the release of Firefox 105. Due to a family emergency, I've been out of the country for a bit and haven't been doing much with any projects, let alone the POWER9 JIT (this is why we need more people working on it!). Now that I've been back for a few days and more or less in the swing of things again, it's time to dust it off and forward port the current version to 102 so people doing ESR JIT builds for Fx91 can continue to do so with Fx102. I'll make an announcement and post a patch set when it's ready.

Comments

  1. Looking forward to read the announcement :-) My experience with the patchset for 97 is only positive.

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  2. Something I’ve noticed with this version of Firefox on Fedora 36… the browser seems oddly sluggish when handling any type of JavaScript. I tested Firefox with hardware acceleration both turned on and off.

    For reference, I’m on Wayland, as X11 seems to give me a ton of trouble on the Blackbird. Perhaps the AMD Radeon is to blame?

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  3. Any inkling of a hope for SeaMonkey? I much prefer it over Firefox (even if I'll take Firefox over Chromium), so if any of the work porting Fx over will work on SeaMonkey I'd be very happy.

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    1. If you're asking in general terms to get SeaMonkey working, 2.53 is based on Firefox 60, so (reaching waaaaaay back) you'll want to backport this: https://www.talospace.com/2019/09/low-level-change-to-firefox-70-and-esr.html

      I remember using Fx56 on the T2 shortly after I got it, so that should work.

      If you're asking about the JIT, however, no hope until they get current. The news isn't all bad, though: once this makes its way back to the tree, it should get incorporated into Thunderbird as well.

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    2. Good to know, thanks! I'll take not having a JIT, if I need JS I can always do the dance of two browsers I'm already familiar with from juggling TenFourFox and Leopard WebKit.

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  4. Hi, did you have the chance to try Firefox 103 or Firefox 104? It doesn't even compile anymore for me and I'm talking about upstream, unpatched Firefox: https://bugs.gentoo.org/866293

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    1. Yes, I tried 103 and it doesn't compile, but I don't get as far as you do - F36 uses gcc 12 and there are multiple problems building debug. Dan Horak is able to get it to build opt, though. Might do 104 with clang if it's still no better. Not the same issue you have there; that seems to be WebRTC-specific.

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    2. With the webrtc patch 104 does now build with both llvm and gcc now.

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