To the Firefox codebase, which will form the basis of the August 25 release of Firefox 80, change disabling for linux support for hardware accelerated video decoding to Wayland-based systems. Acceleration is provided using VA-API (Video Acceleration API) and FFmpegDataDecoder. So support for hardware video acceleration via VA-API and for Linux systems using the X11 protocol.
Previously, stable video hardware acceleration was provided only for the new backend using Wayland and the DMABUF mechanism. For X11, acceleration was not applied due to problems with gfx drivers. Now the problem with enabling video acceleration for X11 is solved via EGL. Also, for systems with X11, the ability to work WebGL through EGL is implemented, which in the future will enable support for hardware acceleration of WebGL for X11.
Currently, this feature remains disabled by default (enabled via widget.dmabuf-webgl.enabled), as not all problems have been resolved yet.
To activate work through EGL, the environment variable MOZ_X11_EGL is provided, after setting which Webrender
and the OpenGL compositing components switch to using EGL instead of GLX. The implementation is based on for X11 based DMABUF, which is prepared by splitting previously proposed for Wayland.
Additionally, it can be noted into the codebase that forms the basis of the release of Firefox 79, a WebRender compositing system for laptops based on AMD chips on the Windows 10 platform. WebRender is written in Rust and allows you to achieve a significant increase in rendering speed and reduce CPU load by moving operations to the GPU side page content rendering, which is implemented through GPU-executed shaders. WebRender was previously enabled on the Windows 10 platform for Intel GPUs, AMD Raven Ridge APUs, AMD Evergreen, and laptops with NVIDIA graphics cards. On Linux, WebRender is currently enabled for Intel and AMD cards only in nightly builds, and is not supported for NVIDIA cards. To force enable in about:config, activate the "gfx.webrender.all" and "gfx.webrender.enabled" settings or start Firefox with the MOZ_WEBRENDER=1 environment variable set.
In Firefox 79 also by default setting to enable dynamic cookie isolation for the domain displayed in the address bar (""when own and third-party inserts are determined based on the site's base domain). The setting is offered in the configurator in the movement tracking blocking settings section in the drop-down block of cookie blocking methods.
Also in Firefox 79 By default, the new experimental settings screen is "about:preferences#experimental", which provides an interface for enabling experimental features, similar to about:flags in Chrome.
Source: opennet.ru