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Firefox Goes PulseAudio Only, Leaves ALSA Users With No Sound (omgubuntu.co.uk)
An anonymous reader shares a report: If you're a Linux user who upgraded to Firefox 52 only to find that the browser no longer plays sound, you're not alone. Firefox 52 saw release last week and it makes PulseAudio a hard dependency -- meaning ALSA only desktops are no longer supported. Ubuntu uses PulseAudio by default (as most modern Linux distributions do) so the switch won't affect most -- but some Linux users and distros do prefer, for various reasons, to use ALSA, which is part of the Linux kernel. Lubuntu 16.04 LTS is one of the distros that use ALSA by default. Lubuntu users who upgraded to Firefox 52 through the regular update channel were, without warning, left with a web browser that plays no sound. Lubuntu 16.10 users are not affected as the distro switched to PulseAudio.
While I quite like PulseAudio, does it even run on anything but ALSA? And would therefore maintaining the old ALSA-only codepath in parallel not be much of an imposition?
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Lennart Poettering is cancer. Mozilla is cancer.
"pulseaudio/systemd isnt a requirement, you can use something else if you dont like it"
--Lennart Poettering
Good people go to bed earlier.
All you need is the --enable-alsa configure option. The resulting Firefox will prefer PulseAudio if it is present, but will use pure ALSA if it is not.
It went all down hill after 3.6.
Note for people bothered by the incessant chattering of auto-play content in their browser, this could be a feature and not a bug!!
Sadly for production boxes this was the decision the moment we realized they stopped support for NPAPI plugins. And more people on slashdot did the same... https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
This isn't the way to go but really we've had enough aggravation with old certificates, unsupported encryption algorithms and so on. Just give me the yes, I really want to run this and leave me alone. Noooo, users are too stupid to be trusted, they'll click anything. I'm on 192.168. or 10. for f*k sake!
Well users are too stupid to upgrade to the latest POS that doesn't let them do their work.
PulseAudio won. Even Slackware gave up and enables pulse audio by default.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
says Lennart Poettering as he maniacally rubs hands together
Since all the power users will bail at the 57pocalypse anyway, Mozilla is subtly trying to encourage earlier migration.
That Lennart Poettering guy is on a roll
[ducks and takes cover from the brigades with pitchforks, torches and flamethrowers]
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
My pet peeve -- all the IPMI management consoles whose SSL causes firefox/chrome to refuse to even allow you to request to ignore the weak encryption, then the java console access applets which new versions of Java refuse to let you load.
All of our IPMI interfaces are connected via a physically separate network, which only a single locked-down machine has access to. It ends up being quicker to open a ticket to ask someone down in the DC go touch the hardware instead of trying to manage some things remotely over IPMI
-Bucky
Firefox needs to get on board, and work in the environments that are present, not the environment they want.
XUL support, NPAPI, XP and legacy (Non SSE2) processors and now ALSA. We need a fork that keeps all these features and Pale Moon isn't it.
n/t
I'm still using ALSA and jack, because I like audio that works for real-time processing / DAW. And pulseaudio causes so many issues that it is not worth using.
And frequently rendering pages as blank white, not catching Captchas, so I keep Vivaldi nearby when signing up for a new website, where I'd expect to see a captcha... If FF keeps going down the shitter, I may look at just biting the bullet and switching 100% to Vivaldi.. Quite a nice browser...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
That's funny, because KSP just recently started supporting ALSA instead of being PulseAudio-only, a couple updates ago.
So you're saying a browser has less capability than a cheap game? Nice.
OTOH I'm still on Firefox 43, because they eliminated fine-grain cookie control in 44, and I use PaleMoon mostly.
It's no wonder users are fleeing Firefox.
You're literally telling them if they want to use Firefox and have working sound they have to build it from source using special configuration flags.
I'm a long-time C and C++ developer. I've built Firefox before. It's not trivial, and it takes a while to compile, even on modern systems. Even moderately technical users wouldn't want to bother with this. Non-technical users would be completely lost. It's so much easier and faster just to install Chrome!
Of course, then we have to assume that this build config option will continue to be supported, will continue to work, and won't be removed unexpectedly at some point in the future. Given the Firefox developers' track record with making radical changes to the UI and other parts of Firefox, I wouldn't count on this option being around in the long term.
Worse than that, I'm concerned about how a custom build of Firefox would be updated to get security fixes and other critical updates. Clearly it can't use the normal automatic updating mechanism, as that would apparently just download and install a build that doesn't support ALSA. So it seems like a user of a custom build like you're proposing would need to be manually checking if there's a new version of Firefox available on a frequent basis, and performing a new custom build each time! Again, this makes Chrome look so much more appealing, and so much easier to update.
What you're suggesting is not acceptable at all. It's a smack in the face to the remaining Firefox users.
It's like Firefox's developers aren't content with their 5% market share. It's like they're doing everything in their power to reduce it as quickly as possible. Is it their goal to get a sub-1% market share by the end of the year?
or a BSD
This is simply not true:
Quite obviously, ALSA remains an option...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
When I was hired at my current employer in 2012, I got a Thinkpad T-series laptop. I installed Debian Squeeze with the XFCE desktop environment on it, and it worked beautifully. I dist-upgraded that installation to Wheezy when that release was made. No problems, everything just continued working. After Wheezy became oldstable, I dist-upgraded to Jessie. No problems, everything just continued working. A few months ago, I switched to a Skylake-powered desktop machine, simply by transferring all the data on the Thinkpad's SSD to my new rig's larger one. No problems, everything just continued working.
Today I got a notification from Firefox (I install new releases via Debian's mozilla repository, https://mozilla.debian.net/) that it won't be able to play back sound if I didn't install PulseAudio. A quick `sudo apt-get install pulseaudio` and a reboot (to also apply a pending Kernel upgrade) later: No problems, everything just continued working. `mpv` defaults to the pulse output instead of alsa automatically, apparently. Firefox, once again, plays back sound out of the box. My desktop audio player (some xmms-fork whose name I can't recall right now) needed to be switched from plain ALSA to pulse via its configuration panel - that was it. My stereo headset becomes the active, default output once I plug it in, and the speakers assume that role as soon as I unplug it. Also, the PulseAudio/pavucontrol features I gained from finally switching are pretty neat.
Bottom line, I guess: PulseAudio in 2017 _just effin' works_. Save yourself some time, skip the whining and bitching, get with the times and install it already.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
Or you could take the hit once and spend half a day writing a script that requests certificates from LetsEncrypt and pushes them to your IPMI controllers. These days, there really is no good excuse for lack of proper certificates other than either laziness or using really poorly designed consumer-grade hardware. Even ancient enterprise-grade hardware has always had support for installing custom certificates. It's really not that difficult, and it even makes your network a little more secure. How much more secure, is of course debatable, as many IPMI controllers seem to have questionable security practices in my experience.
So if you're running Gentoo, the ebuilds should configure Firefox for you just like always, and you'll never notice this change. Or at least until version 54 when it really goes away and suddenly you're wondering why media-sound/pulseaudio is a required dependency for upgrading.
That is of course, assuming that the IPMI controllers are net accessible and that the IPMI controllers allow you to update the SSL certificate to something with modern encryption. The first problem is solvable by creating a local certificate authority. The second one is not solvable at all..
Mozilla is largely used by tech-savvy people. I use it because I can mod the living daylights out of it, from about:config, to the way it acts, looks, performs using on-baord tweaks or add-ons. No other browser allows this level of customisation. Mozilla are losing users because they cannot leave well enough alone.
I just saw this comment in the bug report:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1345661#c53:
LOL! He should have just switched to Chrome or Vivaldi. It takes about a minute to download and install one of those, versus 5 hours to get Firefox working again!
Linux SHOULD have a standardized interface for things like audio (both to the Kernel on the one side and to applications on the other side) with individual builds able to use whatever code somebody prefers to plug that gap between the applications and the kernel. With such a scheme, application writers would code to a fixed audio interface and not care about the details while being shielded from various implementations. You could have a dozen different audio solutions for Linux and your choice would not break any applications.
Audio has always been ugly in Linux land, a few other things too that could be similarly solved like scanner support.
It would be nice if Linus or somebody close to him would setup a project/group to define such interfaces for important stuff and move the Linux community in that direction - it would finally boost the effort to get Linux ready to be a more serious competitor on the desktop. The current instability of having different projects trying to address the same thing (like audio) but with different interfaces is a mess and only helps Apple and Microsoft.
So all I have to do to shut up all of the awful autoplaying crap crammed into every website is to uninstall pulseaudio? Done.
Microsoft is obviously the way to go for long term support.
Your time estimate ignores the redevelopment of the workflow he created around firefox over the years..
Announcement:
For a faster and modern system-compatible experience with all add-ons and plug-ins gradfathered in then please switch to
PaleMoon
your continuation of pre-Chrome FireFox development.
If the problem was certificates, we would've pushed new certificates. It's the ancient SSL/TLS implementations that are the problem.
I agree that IPMI controllers, in general, don't have their security well-implemented. That's the whole reason we have a physically isolated network for the IPMI traffic in the first place.
-Bucky
The PulseAudio fiasco is why I switched my desktop OS from Linux to OS X over a decade ago and my first bitter introduction to Poettering. A lot of people had problems with it. All of the distributions had problems with it. It was covered on Slashdot multiple times. There were heated arguments on mailing lists. And Poettering placed the blame on the distribution maintainers for incorrectly implementing his precious project.
pre-Chrome FireFox development resumes under the PaleMoon with full modern develoments and continuation of grandfathered add-ons and plug-ins tradition.
Compile that shit yourself and you can run ALSA like a real man!
All I ever do is click the mute button on the tab that just opened that obnoxious self-playing video.
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
See, THIS is why I stick with Microsoft products!
Pulseaudio is nortiously linux-specific. We've had nothing but trouble trying to use it on BSD and switched to ALSA (which is a lot more reliable on BSDs) a year or two ago for that reason.
I guess that's the end of Firefox's portability. Most of our users use Chromium anyway because Firefox has been so unstable and crash-prone. Long live Chromium?
-Matt
That makes it even easier to make sure that websites can't make noise at me.
Did you know that vivaldi is just chrome with a colored (themed) frame?
PulseAudio? WTF? This will only make Linux looks like it is still in the 1990s. Bad form. Why specialise on "Gnome only" technology?!
Mozilla developers planned this last year, and when watchful users objected in the related issue, Mozilla staff closed it to comments. They then pushed the system-breaking change to the world, with no mention of it in the release notes. When users whose systems were broken said so in a bug report, Mozilla closed it to comments, too.
I understand the need to minimize clutter in bug reports, but by taking away the only existing channel for users to engage with decision-makers, Mozilla is effectively sticking their fingers in their ears and telling their community to suck it up. How ironic that this was done by Mozilla's engineering community manager. How telling that his public comment invited people to email him to discuss it directly (making himself look good on record), yet he has completely ignored email messages sent to him in the days since then.
I always thought that one of the open source community's greatest strengths was our dedication to helping one another. When I write free software, and encourage people to use and depend on it in their daily lives, I take care to avoid causing unnecessary problems for them in future updates, even if their needs are different from my own. If I do cause such a problem and a bunch of them take the time to identify and report it, I see that as a sign that I made a mistake, I take responsibility for my actions, and I return their favor by spending a bit of time reworking my design.
I do this work partly for personal satisfaction in creating quality software, and partly because I don't like jerking people around, but mostly because I know that my time donated to the community is repaid indirectly, through all the contributions those people make to other open source projects. One of them might be writing the documentation for my favorite version control system, another might be using unusual hardware that exposes an OS bug that I'll need fixed next year, and others might have donated money or suggested a good design idea to projects that make my life easier in some other way. I give a little in the short term, and in return, I receive a lot in the long term.
This ecosystem of diverse and indirect contributions works amazingly well. I don't believe we would have Firefox, Chrome, MacOS (remember its Mach & BSD roots?), Android, Linux, or hundreds of thousands of other wonderful things if not for people in different situations helping one another like this.
So, when developers of a project like Firefox shut out a cross-section of the community that made their jobs possible and from whom they will almost certainly continue to benefit over time, it seems greedy to me. When they deliberately break the systems of the people whom they encouraged to depend on their software, especially when it's something so integral to daily life as the web browser, it seems irresponsible to me. And when onlookers choose disrupt the ensuing discussions by slinging useless comments like "freeloader" or "works for me" at other community members despite receiving value every day from this same community, they seem like hypocritical trolls.
I think we can do better than this. The open source community thrives on diversity and collaboration. Firefox can be replaced, but if we become another monoculture of self-absorbed know-it-alls, we all will have lost an asset of immeasurable value.
tl;dr: Dear Mozilla, you're doing it wrong.
If they remove sysvinit support, Mozilla will loose the last 3 linux users they had!
The original submission was much more informative:
jbernardo writes: While trying to justify breaking audio on firefox for several linux users by making it depend on pulseaudio (and not even mentioning it in the release notes), Anthony Jones, who claims, among other proud achievements, to be "responsible for bringing Widevine DRM to Linux, Windows and Mac OSX", informs users that disabling telemetry will have consequences — "Telemetry informs our decisions. Turning it off is not without disadvantage."
The latest one is, as documented on the mentioned bug, that firefox no long has audio unless you have pulseaudio installed. Many bug reporters suggest that firefox telemetry is disabled by default on many distributions, and also that power users, who are the ones more likely to remove pulseaudio, are also the ones more likely to disable telemetry.
As for the pulseaudio dependence, apparently there was a "public" discussion on google groups, and it can be seen that the decision was indeed based on telemetry.
So, if for any reason you still use firefox, and want to have some hope it won't be broken for you in the future, enable all the spyware/telemetry.
https://slashdot.org/submissio...
I hope nothing got clobbered in my copy/paste. I tried previewing several times, but there can always be something I missed.
As an end-user, I am kind of happy about the removal. It forces the lazy IT apartment to get rid of those crappy-as-shit solutions that still rely on Java (of course, only version 7.x.y.zzz is supported, but of course everyone knows only 7.x.y+1 actually works, and don't forget to never install security updates - neither for Java nor browser - or it will break - no, it does not work on OpenJDK - actually it doesn't work on Linux at all, because it also downloads a native code binary it ALSO runs, in parallel to the Java thing - oh my God please let the world die in a fiery ball of flame because that is the only fair fate for a world that spawned the monster that wrote this piece of shit software).
Ok, I get the annoyance, but for these kind of things, at some point the only reasonable answer is "you spent a shitload on enterprise features, next time use that money to buy something that isn't utter shit and consider this a learning experience".
hi
.rpm
download the source code
install in build directory
edit SOURCES/firefox-mozconfig
add
+ ac_add_options --disable-pulseaudio
+ ac_add_options --enable-alsa
delete
- ac_add_options --enable-pulseaudio
- ac_add_options --disable-alsa
build the firefox local rpm
remove distribution version of firefox and install local version of firefox
repeat after each update of firefox
Maybe this will get finished now.. Was feeling like another half finished project, also with lofty goals.
It's not possible to have "developed a workflow" around Firefox "over the years". Firefox's UI has seen significant changes within that time. Firefox itself would have disrupted any attempt to "develop a workflow".
Besides, have you even looked at Firefox recently? Its UI is almost identical to Chrome's now, due to how Firefox's devs have been imitating Chrome's UI. If you're used to the UI of recent releases of Firefox, then moving to Chrome's UI will be painless. The biggest surprise may be how much more responsive it is than Firefox's UI, which in my experience feels a lot slower than Chrome's.
And with Firefox's upcoming extension system changes, it'll be adopting a Chrome-like model. So even in the rare case of this dude having special custom extensions (which probably wouldn't be working at all anyway due to Firefox recently disallowing unsigned extensions with no easy way to disable this check), he'd have to be reworking them shortly.
Taking 1 minute to download and install Chrome, and 1 more minute to realize it's nearly identical to Firefox (or more accurately, that Firefox is nearly identical to Chrome), is still much, much, much less than waiting 5 hours for a custom build of Firefox to finish, and then having to do such a build each time there's an update to Firefox!
I basically youtube-dl | mplayer so I can watch the fscking video instead of watching a browser.
Which works as long as you're watching YouTube or another site supported by youtube-dl. I tried grabbing this video in youtube-dl, and I got the error "Unsupported URL". What's the second line tool for sites that youtube-dl doesn't support?
Let's Encrypt does not require a server to be Internet accessible, only to have a hostname in a public TLD. The Certbot client requires a server to be Internet accessible because it uses the HTTP challenge. But other ACME clients, such as Dehydrated, instead use a DNS challenge that works for servers that do not receive connections from the Internet.
Or you could take the hit once and spend half a day writing a script that requests certificates from LetsEncrypt
Part of the cost of using Let's Encrypt is the cost of registering and periodically renewing a domain, as the CA/Browser Forum's Baseline Requirements forbid issuing certificates for hostnames in made-up TLDs (such as .local or .internal) or IPv4 addresses in reserved private ranges (10/8, 172.16/12, or 192.168/16). But not every device on every network has a fully qualified domain name. For example, not everybody who runs a home LAN already owns a domain. Is the head of household in every home with a router, printer, or NAS supposed to spend $15 per year (source: Gandi.net) on a domain for said device now? And in the present case, would it be practical to associate a FQDN to each of these IPMI management consoles?
As of today, the verbatim search "poetterix" already has hundreds of results in Google Search, some dating back to June 2013.
why would you use an open-source application without compiling it yourself?
Because you need an executable compiler to bootstrap compiling everything else yourself. True, you can use David A. Wheeler's diverse double-compiling (DDC) construction to reduce the probability of a trojaned compiler to near zero, but you still need binaries of three independently developed compilers for that.
Or because the distribution that you have found to best support the hardware in your laptop has a package manager designed around the assumption that the vast majority of users would be downloading binary packages, not source packages.
A few months ago I got a game that, unfortunately, depended on PulseAudio. I'd been PA-free for years because of problems with it in the past, but I figured it's been long enough that I could give it another chance. As it turns out, this was a terrible idea. You see, I wear headphones. Fairly good ones, with a pretty good volume range. Using them, setting the system volume to around 20-30% of maximum gives a normal, comfortable volume level. I've used them like this for about a decade now with no trouble. At least I did, until I installed Pulse Audio.
You see, PA has a horrible misfeature it calls "flat-volumes". When flat-volumes is enabled, PA-using applications can indirectly change the system-wide volume setting; if the app tries to set its own volume higher than the system volume, PA dutifully increases the system volume along with it. What makes this even worse is, the first time you open an application that uses PulseAudio, it defaults to -- you guessed it -- 100%.
Unfortunately, I had no idea that this "feature" existed until too late. So, after I installed PulseAudio, I started my audio player -- with headphones off, just in case -- and tweaked the various volume knobs to get things comfortable. System volume looked good, and I thought I was set. Then, later, another PA-using application started at 100% while I was listening to music, and it blasted my ears, because suddenly it was at 100% volume when 20% is the safe, comfortable level.
Now I enjoy some minor hearing damage and a constant ringing in my ears. Thanks, Lennart.
Oh, and this absolutely insane default is a known problem. Many distros have started disabling it by default by changing /etc/pulse/daemon.conf, but it's not universal because the PA upstream still thinks flat-volumes is a good default because they think that if 100% is too loud then it's a problem with your soundcard, speakers, etc. and not their fault. (I tried to find the "it's not our fault, your shit is wrong" justification page again to provide a link, but I don't remember what search terms I used to find it before, unfortunately.)
It's not just me, either: here's another story about it from the fedora mailing list, and here's a different one from Reddit. There are even more stories about it online if you search. The only difference with me is I actually suffered some real damage from it.
So, I'd have to say my experience with Pulse Audio has been fairly negative, because my attempt to "skip the whining and bitching, get with the times and install it already" literally caused me physical harm because the know-it-all devs would rather have an unsafe default than admit they did something dumb. People joke about ALSA defaulting to mute, but at least it never blasted my ears.
how hard would it be to fork firefox and just port all the patches that don't touch audio subsytem?
Did not know that. Thanks for the heads up. Gerhard
Ubuntu and its variants are not the entire Linux universe.
In the end it is the age old CADT striking once more.
There is a deep schim forming within Linux. On the one side you have the generation that set up their own gray box servers to handle the office network etc. On the other you have the web monkeys and container cowboys that only know servers as something sitting in the cloud somewhere, to be instantly multiplied as load demands.
And sadly the latter is winning, and forgoing FOSS values for instant multimedia gratification.
They should just drop linux support altogether and tell linux users they need to use wine from now on.
It could help Opera become a little bit more popular. Vivaldi, too, I guess.
Now to stay current with security patches...
It is so tedious when websites fire up noise with out asking you first. A lot of news pages auto play video before the page loads. If you are already listening to something it is such a bugger. More browsers should do this.
why would you use an open-source application without compiling it yourself?
One reason is laziness, which can be more diplomatically phrased as "having other priorities".
Another big reason is lacking access to suitable build tools. For example, compiling an open-source application for iOS requires purchase of a Mac in addition to your iPod touch, iPhone, or iPad, as only Xcode for Mac can manage the signing key for deployment on your device. And there's no way at all for end users to build and install software on most recent retail Nintendo video game consoles, despite that the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS run web browsers based on the open-source WebKit library.
Sounds like they're taking plays from MS...leaving peoples sound broken without warning. Good job on that one.
I see that you completely misunderstand the concept of a FOUNDATION. What happens when a foundation takes control of a piece of software is that all the code is surrounded by a "someone else's problem" field and any attempts to get something fixed becomes some lame duck game of not actually fixing bugs but fixing bug reports. If someone comes along with actual code that is fixed this will cause an almighty panic amongst the foundation coder illuminati and may lead to demands for a sacrifice or at least that the code be reviewed by interdimentional beings. Then as a final punch in the face just as they shut down your (unfixed) bug report they will say you just file another bug report. They are of course fully aware that each time you do this an angel dies. Please stop this madness!
Signed Maomix (Linus Torvalds Cat )