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PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

bugzilla.mozilla.org

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Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#41

Post by shmerl »

thehardsphere wrote: post #30
shmerl wrote: post #27

Without going into the whole "to use or not to use PulseAudio" debate, the problem seems to be the fact, that backend which Firefox uses for audio doesn't have anyone who maintains pure ALSA case. So either they need drop pure ALSA support, to find a maintainer or to change the backend. The last two are clearly harder.

Why is it hard to find a maintainer? I mean, is it just a reflection of Firefox's declining popularity or is there some additional difficulty?

No idea. Is it their own project, or some external one? If the later, the question would be for its developers.

Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#42

Post by paulfurtado »

djsumdog wrote: post #20

Firefox 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 fla…

Note that by default in most distributions, pulse starts running when a user logs in, and runs as that user, but it can easily be configured to run as a system daemon instead to support multiple user sessions using it at the same time.

Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#43

Post by j_koreth »

lallysingh wrote: post #35
adamnemecek wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't have some plugins or Google login (for bookmark/history sync).

It has Google sync the different is mostly in branding and in some codec support

Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#44

Post by wfleming »

thehardsphere wrote: post #28

Question for people who are successfully avoiding having to use PulseAudio: is there any particular distro that you are using that you trust not to go down this road? I haven't used Linux as my daily driver for years but I've been looking at switching back recently. It seems a lot harder to avoid PA than it used to be.

Arch does not use PulseAudio by default, and I'd be surprised if that changed. It's my daily OS, and I'm quite fond of it.

Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#45

Post by journey2 »

On top of the ideological issues I see with things like PulseAudio, it has always given me headaches in practice. I've never had issues with ALSA, but now I need to install an audio server so it can talk to ALSA? These are strange, unfortunate times. I feel linux will eventually succeed at becoming Windows and it makes me sad.

Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#46

Post by paulfurtado »

CaptSpify wrote: post #29
widdma wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PulseAudio is pretty good these days and typically works out of the box for most need. Per app volume is an amazing feature and switching sinks is a breeze. I often play music on my stereo (mobo sound card) and game audio on some headphones (audio over hdmi through monitor). Being able to switch them around live is great. However, like systemd, PulseAudio large and opinionated so it's not everyone's cup-of-tea.

> PulseAudio is pretty good these days and typically works out of the box for most need. Ehh...... I'll disagree with that. I have ~50% success rate of it working on my devices in the past 5 years.

A 50% success rate is pretty bad. May I ask what distributions you're using and which devices you've had trouble on? Are you using any special configuration?

Most modern distros come with pulseaudio by default, which means I'd guess that over 90% of linux users use pulseaudio successfully. I've run workshops helping people install linux on their machines and I've never run into a system where pulseaudio did not work that alsa did.

Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#47

Post by Laforet »

dkbrk wrote: post #40

My system had been ALSA-only for many years, until this change forced me to install PulseAudio. About once a week the audio starts crackling and hissing, and I have to restart the Pulse server. Regardless of how old and unmaintained the ALSA backend was in firefox, it worked, and worked well; I never had a single problem with it.

One major factor is security, everything that isn't being actively maintained is passively accumulating exploits.

For example, debian switched from ffmpeg to libav and eventually back to ffmpeg again because the libav maintainers have consistently slow to act on bugs and security holes whereas ffmpeg was anything but despite having a much smaller team looking after it. Debian's own security team called the switch because it is not worth the manpower to maintain both codecs.

Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#48

Post by [deleted] »

Twirrim wrote: post #25
kuschku wrote: post #4

Well, what did anyone expect? Mozilla has complained for quite a while that their ALSA backend hasn’t been supported or updated in years, and they don’t have the manpower to do so. (Especially with their marketshare falling below 8%). So, after calls for people to support it, this is the end result. It’d be delusional to expect them to support two audio backends, and completely rewrite both of them for multiprocess s…

> Mozilla has complained for quite a while that their ALSA backend hasn’t been supported or updated in years, and they don’t have the manpower to do so. (Especially with their marketshare falling below 8%). What an utterly ridiculous argument. You're implying that everyone using software has to keep track of every single upstream project, their mailing lists and requests. That doesn't even remotely scale on a persona…

[deleted]

Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#49

Post by kuschku »

beedogs wrote: post #21
kuschku wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, pulse is also still quite fragile and has a massive latency. It’d be preferable if for Linux there was an audio server closer to what JACK is (although both JACK and JACK2 aren’t ideal either). (That said, I mix hardware mixing and pulse for my purposes)

I gave up long ago and simply use audio cards that do hardware mixing. There's no need for anything other than ALSA if you do it that way.

Unless you want to do filters or additional in/out channels, and more than the card supports.

In my case, I use 3 audio cards, an internal one for speakers, a Behringer Xenxy Q502 for headphones and microphone, and a backend streaming to my phone (in case I wanna walk around the house listening to music via headphones).

Mixing audio into streams for recording, live stream, headphones, etc isn’t easy even with hardware cards unless you spend a LOT of money.

Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#50

Post by flukus »

djsumdog wrote: post #20

Firefox 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 fla…

> the KDE one

Phonon? Wasn't that just a layer on top of pulse and/or alsa?

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