1715986 - [wayland] Find a better solutions to handle the sharing indicator

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1668358

(Core :: Graphics, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Robert Mader [:rmader]]

The sharing indicator window, showing whether FF uses the webcam, microphone or screen sharing, does not integrate well with the Wayland architecture. Lacking full control over window positioning, it currently does not match how it works on other platforms, including X11.

IMO it would be nice to find a better matching solution. Some ideas:

• Remove it. Modern APIs like portals and pipewire allow the system compositor to fully replace it's functionality. Thus a clean solution would be to just delegate the job to them. DEs like Gnome already do so for the most part. We'd probably first need to ditch old APIs like for webcams first.
• Make it part of the main window instead of using its own window

Any ideas, comments?

Comment 1

[Jan Vlug]

In Firefox 90.0.2 on GNOME Wayland the sharing indicator looks quite good to me. However I suggest to make the sharing indicator "window" by default "Always on top" and "Always on visible workspace". This will ensure that you have a visual reminder that you are sharing.
On the current little sharing "window", you cannot right click to set the proposed settings, as it has no window decoration. This is understandable and acceptable for me, but I think that the defaults I proposed above would be better.

Comment 2

[Robert Mader [:rmader]]

(In reply to Jan Vlug from comment #1)

In Firefox 90.0.2 on GNOME Wayland the sharing indicator looks quite good to me. However I suggest to make the sharing indicator "window" by default "Always on top" and "Always on visible workspace".

On Wayland apps can't do this themselves - at least not yet. It's an important part of the Wayland security architecture that apps don't get to decide where their windows are, so it's not easy to find a good solution for such edge cases.

This will ensure that you have a visual reminder that you are sharing.
On the current little sharing "window", you cannot right click to set the proposed settings, as it has no window decoration. This is understandable and acceptable for me, but I think that the defaults I proposed above would be better.

Depending on your DE you can still open the menu - on Gnome by holding super + right click.

Comment 3

[Jan Vlug]

(In reply to Robert Mader [:rmader] from comment #2)

Depending on your DE you can still open the menu - on Gnome by holding super + right click.
Wow, thanks for this tip! I did not know that, very useful.

Comment 4

[Dallas Strouse [:oro]]

Update on this issue:

The indicator is still broken, and quite annoying. Also unnecessary, as DEs have:

• microphone indicators
• screensharing indicators
• soon-to-be webcam indicators

GNOME has an issue open already: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/2500

Additionally, most webcams have an LED indicating when they're in use.

This indicator is useless and broken on Linux/Wayland, to put it simply.

Comment 5

[Darkspirit]

Firefox 116 (bug 1676705) will be released 2023-08-01 which has:
privacy.webrtc.legacyGlobalIndicator=false
privacy.webrtc.allowSilencingNotifications=true

The screensharing indiator can be hidden as well by setting privacy.webrtc.hideGlobalIndicator=true (bug 1668358).