LinuxQuestions.org - PulseAudio is now required in Firefox Nightly

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PulseAudio is now required in Firefox Nightly

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Make Pulse Audio a hard dependency on Linux so that we reduce the problems and maintenance associated with maintaining multiple audio backends.

It looks like moving forward, Firefox is dropping ALSA support completely and will require Pulse Audio as a hard dependency. There was some discussion around this issue on the Mozilla mailing list in July:

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Our official Firefox builds on Linux support both PulseAudio and ALSA. There are a number of additional contributed backends that can be turned on at compile time, although contribution towards long-term maintenance and matching feature parity with the actively developed backends has been low. On Linux, we actively maintain the PulseAudio backend but we also approach the PulseAudio developers when we see issues in PulseAudio. The PulseAudio developers are generally good to work with.

The most problematic backend across all platforms is ALSA. It is also missing full duplex support. We are intending to add multichannel (5.1) support across all platforms and the ones that don’t make the cut will be the ALSA backend and the WinMM backend used on Windows XP.

Our ALSA backend has fallen behind in features, it is buggy and difficult to fix. PulseAudio is contrastingly low maintenance. I propose discontinuing support for ALSA in our official builds and moving it to off-by-default in our official builds.

Leaving all the ALSA code in tree gives people the opportunity to continue maintaining the ALSA backend. Re-enabling it would require bringing it up to the same standard as other backends, not only in terms of current state but also in terms of consistency of contribution.

As a long time Linux user, I want to get the most value out of our efforts on Linux. I can do that by focusing our efforts on the things that will have the greatest impact. Sometimes that requires taking a step back and deciding to do one thing well instead of two things poorly.

In that thread, it was mentioned that Pulse Audio/ALSA usage was 96.5%/3.5% for Aurora 50 and 98%/2% for Nightly 51. Will this change impact any LQ members? If so, will you install Pulse Audio or change browsers?

--jeremy

My distro of choice just went to Pulse Audio, so I guess I have no worries :)

I prefer Firefox because of NoScript. If the change did not happen in Slackware I probably would live without sound in the browser, which I very rarely use anyway.

The biggest problem I've had with PA so far is that it broke (by way of having a different interface) the volume dial in XFCE (KDE/GNOME/Unity work fine) and I'm not aware of a la carte solutions, so I end up keeping pavucontrol open a lot in my WMs.

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Is pasystray an option for you?

https://github.com/christophgysin/pasystray

Depending on the distro you're using, it may already be available as a built package ready to install.

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Originally Posted by jmccue (Post 5612481)

Same here. I think most of the major distros have switched at this point, no? That would make this change invisible to most users.

I'll change the browser. Being on Funtoo with global USE flags "-gnome gtkstyle -java -kde nvidia -pulseaudio -systemd", I have no other choice...
I don't want to change my Linux into a Microsoft Windows clone.

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Originally Posted by ferrari (Post 5612646)

Is pasystray an option for you?

https://github.com/christophgysin/pasystray

Depending on the distro you're using, it may already be available as a built package ready to install.

That works great. Thank you!

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That works great. Thank you!

Good to know. :)

This is moving sideways, not forward.

I never liked Pulseaudio, I prefer to use JACK. Right now, Firefox works perfectly with my configuration, unlike Chomium.
When this change will hit the release, I'll be forced to find a solution.

BTW, for the ones who use FF just because of NoScript, you can also check uBlock Origin and uMatrix Origin, which work both in FF and Chrom{e,ium} and are (in my opinion of course) much better than NoScript+ABP.

I've read rumors there's no more alsa backend in v52, and that mozilla staff censored complaints about it on bugzilla to make it appear nobody is complaining.
Not that I care, but sometimes I watch youtube in IceCat and I hope alsa backend won't get dropped there as a result of this mess.

Here's a link to bugzilla, for those interested: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1247056

--jeremy

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Will this change impact any LQ members? If so, will you install Pulse Audio or change browsers?

Yes it will impact on me, so I will be looking for a new browser, or use FF on OpenBSD.