From Firefox to Waterfox (refusing to install PulseAudio...)

drtebi · 2017-03-08 08:38:02

OK, this post may be a bit confusing, but I will try to explain as best as I can:

Yesterday I upgraded to Firefox 52.0 and was disappointed to find out that they dropped ALSA support.

On my "daily" Linux system, I have only ALSA installed, and it works perfectly fine with everything else I use. I was so happy that I did not have to mess with additional complications, like PulseAudio etc. Even though I usually got it to work, it just always seemed too complicated to setup.

Instead of downgrading Firefox, I simply started looking for an alternative Mozilla-based browser (so I could keep my bookmards etc.), and found Waterfox (waterfox-bin in AUR). Waterfox does still support ALSA. Once installed, everything seemed to be back to normal, actually, other than the window title saying "Waterfox", everything looked as if I was running my previous Firefox installation.

But here is my confusion:

I cannot start Firefox anymore. It tells me it is already running?
I looked at the files list (pacman -Ql firefox, pacman -Ql waterfox-bin) to see if both Firefox and Waterfox install a mozilla binary (?), but that doesn't seem to be the case. Neither do they both depend on mozilla-common.

So how does this work? Is it because they both use the same mozilla profile, and once it is in use, it is locked?

Another question I should ask... the dropping of ALSA support in Firefox, is that likely to happen with Waterfox too, because it is mozilla based?

Sorry for all the confusing questions, just trying to make sense of it all!

V1del · 2017-03-08 08:47:17

FWIW the change has been delayed and you can use the normal firefox package until 54, and the same issue will likely hit waterfox at that time. ALSA support has been dropped because it's easier for mozilla to support the pulse API. The not responding message is indeed because your profile gets locked by whatever is running first, but a simple google search would have cleared that up.

drtebi · 2017-03-08 09:21:40

V1del wrote:

FWIW the change has been delayed and you can use the normal firefox package until 54, and the same issue will likely hit waterfox at that time. ALSA support has been dropped because it's easier for mozilla to support the pulse API. The not responding message is indeed because your profile gets locked by whatever is running first, but a simple google search would have cleared that up.

I realized while I wrote the question that the "... already running..." message had to be related to a locked profile, sorry.

But I was also curious about the dropping of ALSA.

To be more specific, whether the dropping of ALSA is a mozilla idea, or just a Firefox idea?

V1del · 2017-03-08 09:25:20

Mozilla is the company that works on Firefox I don't really understand what you are asking here? Do you mean that maybe the forks of firefox wouldn't be affected? If they don't want to do a substantial amount of work that isn't officially supported by Mozilla they will be affected.

Lone_Wolf · 2017-03-08 10:18:43

you could try apulse-git from AUR as i have done.

It does give audio outpout with firefox-52.0-1 now, but lacks volume control.

The creator of apulse stopped developing it when apulse allowed skype to work , but is actively developing the code again now.

drtebi · 2017-03-08 10:59:29

V1del wrote:

Do you mean that maybe the forks of firefox wouldn't be affected? If they don't want to do a substantial amount of work that isn't officially supported by Mozilla they will be affected.

Yes, this is what I was trying to find out. I guess I got my answer now... if it is Mozilla based, it will eventually have no more ALSA support.

drtebi · 2017-03-08 11:01:08

Lone_Wolf wrote:

you could try apulse-git from AUR as i have done.
It does give audio outpout with firefox-52.0-1 now, but lacks volume control.
The creator of apulse stopped developing it when apulse allowed skype to work , but is actively developing the code again now.

Interesting, thank you for that idea.

indianahorst · 2017-03-08 11:33:01

You can also try PaleMoon:
https://rohlix.wordpress.com/2017/03/08 … ulseaudio/

Trilby · 2017-03-08 11:55:29

drtebi wrote:

I simply started looking for an alternative Mozilla-based browser (so I could keep my bookmards etc.)

If this is the only reason you have to stay with Mozilla browsers, then you really have no reason to stay with Mozilla browsers. Bookmarks (and most etceteras) can quite readily be exported/imported/converted between nearly every browser out there.

archimboldo · 2017-03-08 19:43:10

What's wrong with PulseAudio? It ain't the devil for sure...

drtebi · 2017-03-08 20:52:15

Trilby wrote:

drtebi wrote:
I simply started looking for an alternative Mozilla-based browser (so I could keep my bookmards etc.)
If this is the only reason you have to stay with Mozilla browsers, then you really have no reason to stay with Mozilla browsers. Bookmarks (and most etceteras) can quite readily be exported/imported/converted between nearly every browser out there.

No it's not just the bookmarks. It's also about a number of add-ons that I use. Switching to a non-mozilla browser means that I would have to find replacements for all of those, testing whether they work as well as they did on Firefox etc.

Regarding bookmarks, I have hundreds, and all of them tagged, some of them commented on. This helps me greatly in finding what I want, and as far as I know, these "extras" of bookmarks are not transferred to other non-mozilla browsers.

Whether PulseAudio is the devil or not, I don't know. All I can say is, that from my past experience, it was a lot of trouble getting PulseAudio to work right.
Here is a long thread on reddit where many other people address their concerns about the dropping of ALSA support:
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/commen … rement_on/

To sum it all up: The dropping of ALSA support on Firefox just means for me that I will have to spend some hours reconfiguring my system, whether that would be because of PulseAudio, or because I need to migrate all my web browsing needs to Chrome or another browser. A waste of time in my opinion.

Last edited by drtebi (2017-03-08 20:53:07)

indianahorst · 2017-03-09 08:18:34

Another temporary workaround: Firefox ESR:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/firefox-esr-bin

Usable till 2018, when the last security update of Firefox ESR 52 will be released.

V1del · 2017-03-15 10:24:08

drtebi wrote:

To sum it all up: The dropping of ALSA support on Firefox just means for me that I will have to spend some hours reconfiguring my system, whether that would be because of PulseAudio, or because I need to migrate all my web browsing needs to Chrome or another browser. A waste of time in my opinion.

Sorry for the snark, but I'm always somewhat irritated when something like this is mentioned: So you can't be bothered to spend a few hours reconfiguring your system (to either move to pulse or to a browser that still supports ALSA), but you fully expect the people that do the actual work you end up using to spend hundreds ( more likely over the project's life span, thousands) of hours maintaining support for a feature that
A) Is used by a minority of a minority (linux users and specifically choosing to use ALSA over the default that is being used in the biggest distributions)
B) Has a cumbersome API that makes certain features people have come to expect hard or impossible to integrate (pulseaudio gives you, for free without any modfication on your application's side: automatic switching to new appearing sounddevices (USB, HDMI Bluethooth) and recovery to something available should one of them disappear, dynamic latency adjustment for specific streams (you can define e.g. audio streams to have a higher latency, but have streams for games have lower latency)

You could of course have all of that using ALSA API (pulseaudio does implement these things somehow after all) but it would mean a significant amount of additional work and maintenance burden for applications that want to do so.

I don't intend to start a flame war and you are of course free to do whatever, but I hope you see the irony in this. If there was vested enough interest at Mozilla (or with 3rd party contributors) ALSA support would likely be kept, but as it stands the contributors feel it a better investment of their time to make sure one API is properly supported - which they are also free to do.

(Small Side Rant: Judging something as ever changing and fluent as an actively developed piece of software based on "past" experiences isn't really a good measure. How past? 10 years ago when it was first introduced in Ubuntu (and discouraged by upstream)? Pulseaudio does still have a few issues here and there, but it also fixes with a lot of things, whether you have an use for these is another story)

Last edited by V1del (2017-03-16 09:32:38)

Arch Linux

#1 2017-03-08 08:38:02

From Firefox to Waterfox (refusing to install PulseAudio...)

#2 2017-03-08 08:47:17

Re: From Firefox to Waterfox (refusing to install PulseAudio...)

#3 2017-03-08 09:21:40

Re: From Firefox to Waterfox (refusing to install PulseAudio...)

#4 2017-03-08 09:25:20

Re: From Firefox to Waterfox (refusing to install PulseAudio...)

#5 2017-03-08 10:18:43

Re: From Firefox to Waterfox (refusing to install PulseAudio...)

#6 2017-03-08 10:59:29

Re: From Firefox to Waterfox (refusing to install PulseAudio...)

#7 2017-03-08 11:01:08

Re: From Firefox to Waterfox (refusing to install PulseAudio...)

#8 2017-03-08 11:33:01

Re: From Firefox to Waterfox (refusing to install PulseAudio...)

#9 2017-03-08 11:55:29

Re: From Firefox to Waterfox (refusing to install PulseAudio...)

#10 2017-03-08 19:43:10

Re: From Firefox to Waterfox (refusing to install PulseAudio...)

#11 2017-03-08 20:52:15

Re: From Firefox to Waterfox (refusing to install PulseAudio...)

#12 2017-03-09 08:18:34

Re: From Firefox to Waterfox (refusing to install PulseAudio...)

#13 2017-03-15 10:24:08

Re: From Firefox to Waterfox (refusing to install PulseAudio...)

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