WSL2 Firefox Wayland Issue

How it Started

When I updated my WSL2 and Kali Linux Packages. Noticed that the interface of my firefox had changed.

Understanding the Problem

WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux 2) provides a Linux kernel and allows users to run a full Linux distribution on Windows. However, with newer versions of WSL2, Wayland has been the default graphical server protocol. Since WSL2 doesn’t have full native support for Wayland, these issues might occur:

• Scrolling problems on web pages (does not go all the way to the bottom or the top, scrolling feels “jaggy”)
• Cannot press menu buttons, nothing shows up upon pressing eg. Downloads. (had to shift + click instead to open something)
• GUI not rendering properly

Solution

To fix these issues, we’ll force Firefox to use X11, an older but more widely supported protocol for graphical application.

export MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=0

This will disable Wayland and force Firefox to use X11 instead.

Referrence

• https://www.reddit.com/r/wsl2/comments/1fyxfk1/firefox_not_working_properly_on_wsl2/
• https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/1119