well I deleted that ~/.mozilla/firefox directory . started firefox it did as it should - I had to sign in and sync it again for my book marks and such. I went to youtube and everything worked. I shut it down rebooted and fired up firefox again and everything went back to no more video just that fancy F and sound.

this was never an issue until one day firefox had a version upgrade 40x something -- I suppose I could blast out slack and reinstall it and do this again to try and prove a point and find out if it is me or firefox with a new install of slack without any changing of anything whatsoever files.

Fancy F for Flash? or fancy F for Firefox? or fancy F for fedora? or fancy F for ... ... ...

I'm about to find out if Debian's build has alsa support, since I don't have Pulse Audio on my system. Luckily Debian makes it pretty easy to simply rebuild the package with the added compile option.

Edit: Firefox 52.0-1 and 53.0~b4-2 don't seem to have alsa support

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I believe the switch to pulseaudio was driven by the new sandbox? It's also still possible to build firefox with alsa support (for now).

But the average person complaining and ranting has little influence over such projects. Unless you are writing code or paying the bills you don't really have a say. Developers have to choose what works best for the project and as a result there are those who won't like it. Developers have to make informed technical decisions, not decisions based on emotions or biases.

This is not the first time mozilla have done things I didn't like. I did not like the google widevine DRM, the UI redesign a few years ago, I did not like the new rapid release before that. But ultimately, when it comes to fully functioning 'free' web browsers, there are few choices - and all come with a google payload. We don't pay anything, but get to use the end results for 'free'.

you'd have to write YouTube and ask them what the fancy F is for... think about it. I didn't put it there. They did.

I got a chit in to trouble shoot this so I am not going to be talking about it in here anymore. cheers

While I really like the idea of pushing Pulseaudio as the one and only audio backend for Linux it is also a slap for many of us users who simply don't want or need PA to listen to music.

I know for certain that for example my X60t with Debian Stable on it would run just fine with regular ALSA, I believe the only reason it even has PA installed is because of Steam.

For the average user this might not be much of an issue and most likely they won't ever notice.
In terms of freedom and choice however, Mozilla loses his sight for such things.

There's apulse I guess for those not wanting pulse to any degree.

https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse

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Edit: the option --enable-alsa does work. I was editing the wrong mozconfig.

It's the first Firefox I've compiled since 35. The build itself didn't take long, but I'm not sure what's up with the runreftest.py. It added hours to the compile time. (seems to get stuck on a few tests)