on arch here. haven't seen the problem yet, and I'm on 52.0. why am I not affected? I don't have pulseaudio installed (only some client libraries. lib32-libpulse, to be precise). this doesn't look good. thanks for the post.
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PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems
11–20 of 89 posts
Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems
#12on arch here. haven't seen the problem yet, and I'm on 52.0. why am I not affected? I don't have pulseaudio installed (only some client libraries. lib32-libpulse, to be precise). this doesn't look good. thanks for the post.
arch is compiling it with alsa support, but only for a couple more versions. https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/53195
thanks. this is pretty scary.
guess I'll be using Chromium when that day comes, as I'd rather not run PulseAudio.
Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems
#13on arch here. haven't seen the problem yet, and I'm on 52.0. why am I not affected? I don't have pulseaudio installed (only some client libraries. lib32-libpulse, to be precise). this doesn't look good. thanks for the post.
you should be fine as arch are compiling their binary with alsa enabled
https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/P...
line 97 for reference
Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
arch is compiling it with alsa support, but only for a couple more versions. https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/53195
thanks. this is pretty scary. guess I'll be using Chromium when that day comes, as I'd rather not run PulseAudio.
You could volunteer to rewrite Firefox’s entire ALSA backend to add multiprocess support.
That’s what caused this, because Mozilla doesn’t have the manpower to rewrite two backends, and so had to choose one (with the pulse backend being preferred, as the pulse maintainers help mozilla and fix bugs on their side, while mozilla reports getting no assistance or anything from the ALSA maintainers).
Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems
#15I gave up on Firefox at the end of last year, and I don't miss it at all. If I hadn't already done it, though, this would've sent me over the edge. (I do not and will never run Pulse on any of my systems.) Currently using a stripped-down version of Chrome, and web browsing has never been better. Edit: the downvoting on this site is goddamned baffling sometimes. What about my comment has you guys offended today?
What is the stripped-down version of Chrome you use? Is it something prepackaged or something you've crafted by stripping yourself?
Maybe Chromium? https://www.chromium.org/Home
It's prepackaged but I kind of lost track how it's different. It used to be that it didn't support flash but that might have changed.
Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
thanks. this is pretty scary. guess I'll be using Chromium when that day comes, as I'd rather not run PulseAudio.
You could volunteer to rewrite Firefox’s entire ALSA backend to add multiprocess support. That’s what caused this, because Mozilla doesn’t have the manpower to rewrite two backends, and so had to choose one (with the pulse backend being preferred, as the pulse maintainers help mozilla and fix bugs on their side, while mozilla reports getting no assistance or anything from the ALSA maintainers).
I wish I could. but I don't have the knowledge or the time.
Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems
#17I had a brief panic at just reading ALSA. I haven't used the linux desktop in years, but audio was always such a pain. I hope things have improved.
tell me about it ha ha
i think the biggest genius was making a pulseaudio alsa backend so most legacy apps just work
Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems
#18I'm in the same boat, Firefox 52 broke ALSA, and Plugins.
I need both. So I'm permanently on 51.
Mozilla: You are making a mistake, revert both of these decisions!
For example see: http://www.kongregate.com/forums/1-kongregate/topics/716510-...
Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems
#19I gave up on Firefox at the end of last year, and I don't miss it at all. If I hadn't already done it, though, this would've sent me over the edge. (I do not and will never run Pulse on any of my systems.) Currently using a stripped-down version of Chrome, and web browsing has never been better. Edit: the downvoting on this site is goddamned baffling sometimes. What about my comment has you guys offended today?
What is the stripped-down version of Chrome you use? Is it something prepackaged or something you've crafted by stripping yourself?
Currently, Iron browser.
https://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php
It's gone from "broken on most sites" to "pretty much totally usable" since about October.
Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems
#20Firefox is cross platform. It has to support Win32/64 sound, Linux (alsa/pulse), whatever the hell FreeBSD and MacOS use ..
Back in 2013 I had a lot of issues with Steam games not running correctly with PulseAudio (lots of static instead of sound half the time I tried to start a game). Sometimes doing a killall on the pulseaudio server would help, sometimes it would not. On that machine, I added a -pulseaudio USE flag in Gentoo and removed it entirely.
On my current machines, I do use Bluetooth audio and find PA easier to deal with. I also no longer play games on my Linux boxes.
I'm also old enough to remember the horrors of ESound and the KDE one (whatever it was called) and how audio would constantly be out of sync.
Pulse is a lot better and seems to do well today. Still Pulse has some huge limitations. Run two X servers and use either consolekit or systemd? Good luck trying to get audio to continue playing on both X servers at the same time. It won't. Want to run MPD as a system daemon? You'll need to figure out how to enable TCP in Pulseaudio.
I don't run SystemD, but I do run Pulseaudio. Those are my choices. Gentoo still gives me that choice, which is why I use it as my home and work distro. Void is another great Linux distribution that gives you such choice as well.
Like I started with, Firefox has to support a ton of audio backends for various operating systems. We're not talking about maintaining OSS support. Pulse still depends on ALSA in the Linux kernel for it to work, so ALSA isn't going away any time soon. There's no reason for Firefox to need to depend on that intermediary layer and remove direct access when that already exists.