From bugzilla:
I found a brief discussion on LQ here and wanted to further explore this. As a consistent Gentoo user since 2.6, I've never had to deviate from ALSA until now. Granted sometimes configuring it is a PITA, but once it is properly set up issues seldom arise.

For background, this is a good reference explaining the audio system in Linux.

AFAIK PulseAudio runs as a layer between the ALSA drivers and the software. To quote Nathan Willis

So basically, PulseAudio still requires ALSA to function at some level. Removing support for ALSA is only adding latency to the system, right? And further complicating things?

There has been a lot of discussion over the years related to the unnecessarily complicated audio system in Linux. Does moving more applications to software like PulseAudio add to this complication? Or is this a step in the right direction?

From what I understand:

If you have a microphone and want to talk to somebody AND record your microphone to a file, this is impossible with ALSA.
Because it goes Microphone Hardware -> Talk to somebody
However, pulseaudio creates a layer that allows it to duplicate that stream so that you can send audio to that layer, which can then send it to talk to someone and record it.

Or if you want to play music AND record it

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I had heard about that as well, but I have not been paying too much attention to it.

My installation is openSUSE and I have never used ALSA a lot. Still, seeing the large amount of users still relying on ALSA for their sound, this should have some uncomfortable impact I suppose. At the end, I suppose it will just result in more people moving over to Google Chrome. In fact, a lot of people are already migrating for several reasons.

Yet, I wonder if this will also be the case for IceWeasel, or if they will keep support ALSA for the time being.

AFAIK ALSA supports this through HW and SW mixing, depending on your sound controller. You can record what you hear


(source)

This makes sense now, I didn't realize that PulseAudio worked on M$ and POSIX platforms. From the Mozilla developer's point of view it does make sense to drop support for ALSA. It will be interesting to see if other applications start to follow this precident.

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Oh, I did not realize that either.. As I said, I did not use ALSA a lot anyways.

Though now this makes more sense.. At least from a general point of view. I still wonder, whether or not the other browsers will follow this or not.

PulseAudio has been around for over a decade and most distros use it. It also runs on all the POSIX systems, but the Windows version seems to have been abandoned. Like any software, it had initial teething troubles, and these tend to be still cited — generally by the sort of people who still cite 1990s problems with dependency resolution...

I think I am one of the people of which you type. I cannot even think of PulseAudio without an expletive in my head.
However, I have lived with it for a while and it seems to allow multiple streams in and out a lot more xo sistently than ALSA. Don't get me wrong, I've had ALSA stream, split streams and the like just fine but only very fragile configurations -- used less CPU though.
PulseAudio, to me at least, does actually seem like fairly good software nowadays (that's a compliment).

The fox is usually a wise animal. It is clever. It does not drop some good old working technology like ALSA in favor of an instable new feature shiny nonsense called pulse.

If the fox is not wise and chooses the path of pulse then me would have to drop the usage of fox after decades.

sniff sniff

so it's been over two years now, eh? time flies...

i'm still using vanilla firefox (well seamonkey actually), and plain ALSA.
I manage media playback with a simple addon that allows me to open links with a program or custom script. unsurprisingly, it's called "Open With...".
that points to mpv, which is able to play almost every link I throw at it through the magical powers of youtube-dl.


erm. i don't like it either, but it's definitely not new or particularly unstable.

i did not say new but 'new feature'. software that orients on 'new features' often forgets about good old traditional approach that has stability as priority.

after years i did not have a single issue with ALSA but i can not tell this about PULSE..

the fox really should not burn the bridge ALSA in favor of PULSE. rather it should keep both. ANALOGY: that is like to rip out all LAN cables out of a building just because now you have WIFI. doing this would be stupid and ignorant.

That's the ideal to strive for. The problem in this case was the Mozilla project's choice to make a major switch in tools, which in turn caused need for ALSA-specific maintenance/maintainer, which nobody paid anybody to do, and for which no one offered to step up and do for free. I'm not defending the result, just passing along what I understand to be the facts that created the loss. It's not unlike, though less serious than, the much less recent decision to make Firefox the project flagship, replacing the Mozilla Suite that was the reason for the project's creation. Some of us remain (SeaMonkey) suite users, but it is getting more and more difficult to do so, and may become impossible before much longer. As it turns out, ALSA does still work in SeaMonkey latest.

it does?
which version, installed from where?
because it does not work on mine: 2.49.4-3.

I have questions for you too, so contact me for dialog mrmazda AT [removed] dot net or nick a-865 on IRC freenode or moznet

Happily using Firefox 63 with neither pulseaudio or ALSA, but OSS, in OpenBSD 6.4. Frankly, the creeping "Poettering-ware" in Linux is one of the reasons I left Linux for BSD. I don't know what the OpenBSD folks have done to make audio work in FF, but I'll take it.

I'm with you, JW, most of my machines are now running OpenBSD - Linux seems to be becoming a version MS - not very 'Unix like' any more.

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