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Forced to use pulse audio with firefox

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  • Nuɖoɖo mlɔetɔ James

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I use Ubuntu and was not pleasantly surprised that to use Firefox I am forced to use Pulse Audio. I avoid using that sound system because of problems with latency, static noises, and bloat. I found Pale Moon which has direct support for ALSA. It's too bad Mozilla did not bother to warn of the change. Until I used Chrome, and eventually saw the message in Firefox to use Pulse, I thought my sound system crashed. I have removed Firefox and am using Pale Moon or Google Chrome.

I use Ubuntu and was not pleasantly surprised that to use Firefox I am forced to use Pulse Audio. I avoid using that sound system because of problems with latency, static noises, and bloat. I found Pale Moon which has direct support for ALSA. It's too bad Mozilla did not bother to warn of the change. Until I used Chrome, and eventually saw the message in Firefox to use Pulse, I thought my sound system crashed. I have removed Firefox and am using Pale Moon or Google Chrome.

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Alsa support was dropped starting Firefox 52.0 and later. Some Linux distros may have delayed this change with their own third-party Firefox packages.

You could compile Firefox yourself with --disable-pulseaudio --enable-alsa

Keep in mind that if you do this you will not get updates from Mozilla as it will be a third-party build.

Bug 1247056 - Require PulseAudio to play sound on Linux