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Firefox Goes PulseAudio Only, Leaves ALSA Users With No Sound (omgubuntu.co.uk)

Posted by msmash on from the sound-nazi dept.

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.

6 of 322 comments (clear)

  1. so the saying goes by nimbius · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "pulseaudio/systemd isnt a requirement, you can use something else if you dont like it"
    --Lennart Poettering

    --
    Good people go to bed earlier.
  2. Firechrome by sinij · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It went all down hill after 3.6.

  3. Everyone is doing it by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Insightful

    PulseAudio won. Even Slackware gave up and enables pulse audio by default.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    1. Re:Everyone is doing it by KiloByte · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Only if "produces no sound on hardware where plain ALSA works perfectly" counts as winning for you.

      --
      The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
  4. Re: This is silly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What benefit do Firefox users get?

    Future compatibility for when systemd wraps pulseaudio into itself. You know it's coming.

  5. Re:Switched to PulseAudio today - here's my story by epyT-R · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So you equate your rather limited usecase and expectations with everyone elses needs, call them whiners, and then top it off with a nice appeal to antiquity fallacy.

    Great.