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.
