[arch-general] Firefox 52 Audio broken

[jjgaris]

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.