debiman wrote:folks, no unfounded panic please.
firefox is in many distros' repos and does not need pulseaudio.*snip*
whatever little truth the rumour is based on, it's not like the title says.
i tried to make sense of
the bug report, but couldn't. too much noise.
It's not unfounded panic, it's not a rumour, it's official announcement from Mozilla : "From
Firefox 52 onwards,
pulseaudio is a hard requirement for sound on linux. Alsa is unsupported and alsa code will be removed in
Firefox 54." All this is written on the bug report you failed to make sense of.
Firefox 52 has just been released and the issue is now live and kicking.
debiman wrote:can you back that with some info?
i guess the info is in that bug report?
could you please point the relevant sections out.
From this Arch bug report[1] about the issue, it seems that the upcoming
Firefox sandbox feature breaks Alsa. Alsa code will stay in
Firefox unsupported until its removal in
Firefox 54. In the meantime there is a build time flag --enable-alsa to compile
Firefox with alsa support.
From the Mozilla bug, OP states without substantiating that this move is made to reduce the problems and maintenance associated with maintaining multiple audio backends. Then says "The point is to avoid people accidentally not installing Pulse Audio and having a broken/poor playback experience." without explaining why it would be so. Others argue that "Making it a hard dependency makes the choice "install libpulse or don't use
Firefox", rather than "install libpulse otherwise you won't have sound in
Firefox"."
About 75% of the sound issues I've experienced in Linux over the years were solved by uninstalling
pulseaudio to use alsa, to me this is trying to fix something that's not broken and I fall precisely in the "install libpulse or don't use
Firefox" case. So I guess I'll pin
Firefox to v51 while I decide which other web browser to use.
Then after the release of
Firefox 52 this "feature" grabbed the attention of users unhappy with this move and after two complaints in the bug report the comments have been restricted.
[1]:
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/53195