Honestly, as a developer, these sorts of vitriolic comments only make me want to fix these kinds of bugs less.<p>There is real cost to supporting features, and very often, the decision basically amounts to having to choose which feature scarce resources is used for. So you have to be prepared to defend having to divert resources for pet features--keeping in mind that sometimes the other feature is "making sure it builds tomorrow."<p>From what I can tell, the ALSA backend has been poorly maintained for some time. When the present state of affairs is deficient, and probably retarding code quality in other areas. If it's in a poor state for a long time, it's hard to argue that it is necessary to maintain support--or even that desupporting it will make a huge impact.<p>If you want to convince me to support something, offering help would be a great start. It could be as little as offering to test and QA a feature, or as much as providing an implementation patch and offering to maintain it for the foreseeable future. Insulting my intelligence and issuing threats for noncompliance are just going to result in me ignoring you, perhaps after laughing at you for a bit.<p>And remember, if you're not familiar with the relevant code, you're not really qualified to say how hard it is to actually do something. Code architectures may not be implemented the way you expect them to be, so what seems like it should be an obvious minor feature may turn out to require thousands of lines of changes (that was exactly how my first open source contribution turned out--what I thought should have been a five-line patch or so was really 1000 or so lines of changes).
Firefox is cross platform. It has to support Win32/64 sound, Linux (alsa/pulse), whatever the hell FreeBSD and MacOS use ..<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
The comments on the bug are exemplary of the kind of crap we deal with when supporting Linux users, and really go a long way towards making people not want to spend any time on these issues.<p>If you actually read the details you'd note that the code to support ALSA wasn't <i>removed</i>, it was simply put behind a configure option (--enable-alsa). Most of the people complaining in the bug are running builds from a distro that provides Firefox builds, doesn't ship PulseAudio, but <i>didn't bother building Firefox with that option</i>. Their distro shipped them a broken build so of course they come to complain in Bugzilla.
Well, what did anyone expect?<p>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%).<p>So, after calls for people to support it, this is the end result.<p>It’d be delusional to expect them to support two audio backends, and completely rewrite both of them for multiprocess support, when ALSA is used by less than 1% of users (as seen by the Mozilla hardware survey results), and the work can be used better for the other 99% of users.
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.
Honestly, I get it. Alsa is not the future, unless someone steps up and maintains it. And it looks like that's not going to happen. I firmly believe that we should move on.<p>But part of moving on requires that we look at PA's problems. Everytime a PA thread comes up, people disregard and yell at everyone who has a problem with PA. PA has a bad reputation for a reason, and it's not just Pottering hate (though that's likely part of it). It's that PA is <i>not good software</i>. It needs to be fixed. And until it is, you'll have people wanting to go back to software that "just worked".
I 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.
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.
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.
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?<p>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.
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).<p>this doesn't look good. thanks for the post.
So the guy that has been in office barely 3 years throws his arms up and goes for the latest shiny. More and more i see where JWZ is coming from, though i can't say i share his fondness for Apple products.
I'm in the same boat, Firefox 52 broke ALSA, and Plugins.<p>I need both. So I'm permanently on 51.<p>Mozilla: You are making a mistake, revert both of these decisions!<p>For example see: <a href="http://www.kongregate.com/forums/1-kongregate/topics/716510-announcement-official-npapi-unity-java-support-ending-in-firefox-on-march-7-2017" rel="nofollow">http://www.kongregate.com/forums/1-kongregate/topics/716510-...</a>
I 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.<p>Edit: the downvoting on this site is goddamned baffling sometimes. What about my comment has you guys offended today?