On Tue, Mar 07, 2017 at 01:58:15PM +0100, Damjan Georgievski via arch-general wrote:
Since the update to firefox 52 the audio support has been broken.
nope, it works fine.
alas, ALSA support in Firefox has become unmaintained … this means if Arch reverts to ALSA it'll be shipping worse code just for the few people that choose to not use Pulseaudio (for their own reasons).
This seems to be because pulse audio is now a dependency by default in firefox. However firefox can still be build with ALSA support.
Without getting into any dicussion about issues about pulseaudio itself, I believe it should be possible to use firefox on arch without being forces to use pulse audio. I am certainly not the only one to have banned this package from my boxes. And having more choices is certainly a good thing.
Not sure this is the right place but I would like to ask to change back to the old defaults (ALSA). With the old defaults, the user can choose to use pulse audio (or JACK) or stay with plain ALSA support.
-- damjan
Several firefox developers still choose to use firefox build with ALSA support. While official support may not exist, it still works will will continue to do so. And while I wanted to avoid the discussion about why not to use pulseaudio, let me respond by saying ther is no worse code then pulseaudio... And there are not only a few people who chose to remove pulseaudio from their systems. In any case I believe it should be a goal to let the users decide what software they want to use, especially if it does not create extra work. (Using pulseaudio by default will however create a lot of work for a lot of people) Again, there is no reason to follow the decision by upstream, it will only create problems and extra work while restricting the freedom of the users. I could understand this if deviating from upstream meant more work, but it is only a matter of setting another compile flag. If future version do not work with ALSA anymore this can be change but at the moment it does work.