Firefox on the Steam Deck is getting a significant under-the-hood overhaul. Igalia, the open source consultancy working with Valve, is migrating Firefox from its X11 backend to native Wayland rendering under the Gamescope compositor, using the wl_compositor protocol directly. The transition addresses longstanding limitations of running Firefox through X11 on SteamOS, including stuttering during touch scrolling, broken fullscreen handling, and inconsistent gamepad input. Eri Pazos Pérez of Igalia laid out the project's current state at XDC 2026 on 2026-09-28.
The Gamescope compositor is central to the Steam Deck's display stack, managing per-game color profiles, frame pacing, and resolution scaling. Running Firefox natively on Wayland through Gamescope rather than bridging through XWayland means the browser can tap into features like HDR video output and proper session management without the translation layer eating performance or introducing visual glitches. Igalia's work also includes replacing udev with inputfd for input device handling, a change that could simplify how Firefox interacts with the Deck's built-in controls and external peripherals.
The broader significance here is for SteamOS as a general-purpose Linux desktop. Valve has been steadily pushing SteamOS beyond a gaming-only environment, and a properly integrated browser is a prerequisite for that vision. Igalia has already landed fixes for notification handling and is working on upstreaming patches to both Firefox and Gamescope. The full slide deck and the recorded XDC presentation are available for those who want the technical details.
