Pale Moon forum

Mozilla Firefox stops (as the only browser) the ALSA-support for Linux with version 52 and requires Pulseaudio as a hard dependency!

Will Palemoon follow this?

chalee wrote:Mozilla Firefox stops (as the only browser) the ALSA-support for Linux with version 52 and requires Pulseaudio as a hard dependency!

Will Palemoon follow this?

Pale Moon is not Firefox and never will be again. I think it's safe to say that won't force pulseaudio as a hard dependency.

half-moon wrote:

chalee wrote:Mozilla Firefox stops (as the only browser) the ALSA-support for Linux with version 52 and requires Pulseaudio as a hard dependency!

Will Palemoon follow this?

Pale Moon is not Firefox and never will be again. I think it's safe to say that won't force pulseaudio as a hard dependency.

A sane decision.

It depends on what is going to be supported going forward.. You know the best choice?

Matt A Tobin wrote:It depends on what is going to be supported going forward.. You know the best choice?

The best choice is to let the choice to the user...

Personally, I find Pulseaudio extremely annoying while ALSA or OSSv4 can deal alone with everything (thanks to their virtual and transparent mixer). Pulseaudio is just a supplementary (and dispensable) layer that most people do not need (it can be of use for networked sound, additional sound processing and stuff like that).

I'm new to the forum (as a registered member), but I've been using PaleMoon since 2014. I've been a 32-bit (X86) Linux user for better than 11 years now. So I'm wondering, Matt, just what do you mean by "depends on what is going to be supported going forward"? Supported by whom? ALSA has ALWAYS been supported by the Linux operating system, whereas pulseaudio is much more recent and has never been considered a replacement for ALSA in the Linux kernel. I don't even use ALSA itself; I use OSS 4 (not "emulation"), but I do have alsa-lib installed, and my sound works beautifully in PaleMoon. If PaleMoon were to switch to pulseaudio instead of ALSA, I would be a "dead duck" where sound is concerned.
In fact, truth be told, if the day comes when PaleMoon drops support for ALSA or drops support for the X86 (32-bit) architecture, I would feel compelled to look for a different Web browser.

There is also the element here at Pale Moon of not changing stuff for change sake.. There has to be a real tangible gain and a sane reason for doing something. I am not fully versed on this latest controversy but it would seem to me that as long as what we have works and works well and both systems are being supported by Linux distros and isn't going to be fucked over like gstreamer was for a barely comparable example.. I see no reason to change it.

You also need to understand that developmental choices also factor in to making a decision. While user choice is paramount it must be balanced with developer choice.. Going one way or the other to an extreme is what gets projects into trouble.

If I wasn't so busy I'd run down and work out this latest "travesty" but at this point and time I don't have the time.

To get a big discussion (from other forums) clear: Firefox 52 only plays sound now if Pulseaudio is installed on a Linux system!

While a lot of distributions (like Ubuntu) comes with this, a lot of other distros dont and there is an unknown count of users that removed Pulseaudio to use ALSA as the default soundsystem for many reasons! If they had Firefox as main-browser, the sound is broken now.

e.g. Lubuntu, KXstudio, QStudio64 and others are pure ALSA-based Linux distros.

Note: ALSA is the default sounddriver in Kernel and the default soundsystem in EVERY Linux.

Pulseaudio, Jack and other are just audio-server-backends that uses ALSA.

Pulseaudio don't plays sound, if there is no ALSA!

So the main standard for every application in Linux should be to support ALSA - if you want to have sound.

Just Microsofts skype and now Mozilla NEEDS Pulseaudio or make it a hard-dependency.

The developers of the multimedia-part of Firefox explained this break with:

a) ALSA is too difficult for them and Pulseaudio is the easierst
b) they want to support 5.1 surround sound now, and this could be better (or easier) with PA
c) they want to support DRM and Netflix/Amazone now

I think the last two ones are the most important for them.

They want to make a "multimediaplayer" out of Firefox with best support for paytv!??

While they did this, a lot of people are switching to another browser now.

Like me..

I was using firefox more than 10y ...

Great to have Palemoon instead..




here are some threads around this "bug":

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1247056

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1345661

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2355092

i was damn right: http://www.ghacks.net/2017/03/23/you-ca ... -on-linux/

civilrights-movement and oen press warns about EME/DRM as official web-standard : https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung ... 63153.html (german)

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170 ... tool.shtml

Brave New World

I'm a new user of Pale Moon due to Firefox new policy to force the use of special inefficient software, which I don't need.

Good to see that Pale Moon is not considering to drop ALSA support.

hi all,

is this still true? with 27.3.0, after uninstalling pulseaudio i no longer have audio.

is there a magic flag i need to set? or perhaps the package was compiled without alsa support?

s.

andy_landy wrote:hi all,

is this still true? with 27.3.0, after uninstalling pulseaudio i no longer have audio.

is there a magic flag i need to set? or perhaps the package was compiled without alsa support?

s.

(I just noticed that this thread isn't for tech support; feel free to move or delete my reply)

If you use a distro that comes with Pulseaudio by default you can't just uninstall it and expect things to work.

Normally there are more than one soundcard in a system (physical soundcard or virtual soundcard or GFX-card with HDMI). If you just remove Pulseaudio chances are that your system will default to the wrong soundcard and you will have no sound at all.

Using Linux without Pulseaudio requires either a program to select appropriate soundcard as “default” or manually doing so (doing it manually isn't easy so I would advise against that).

My guess is that it isn't just Pale Moon that isn't playing audio, but sound on your system is generally broken now? (You should post your tech support questions in Community Support instead of Development)

I agree about everything negative being said about Pulseaudio in this thread. It's broken by design.

However, if you just want to play audio and don't stress your audio system, Pulseaudio generally works. Pulseaudio makes it easy to select default soundcard and has a few other benefits.

Wow, I never thought I would write something positive about Pulseaudio...

ALSA may be present in every linux distro, but it is also a low-level system API. Compare it to talking directly to a video driver instead of using DirectX -- it's not "too difficult", but rather "too complex", and asking the browser to take on the task already filled by PulseAudio. It makes sense to remove direct ALSA support if PulseAudio is expected to be available, even more so on an O.S. that tends to have frequent and uncoordinated updates of system libraries and the kernel. You want an abstraction layer in that case.

So yes, moving to PulseAudio is a logical and desired step at this point.

Well, I never installed PulseAudio on my system, not because of its bad reputation but because it is just unnecessary for me. All the software I use provides sound happily without it.

Moonchild, does it mean that ALSA support has been dropped / may be dropped in future? I agree it may not be worthwhile to fix something related to ALSA. But if it is working currently, it would be better to keep the support IMO.

adesh wrote:Well, I never installed PulseAudio on my system, not because of its bad reputation but because it is just unnecessary for me. All the software I use provides sound happily without it.

That's the same attitude as saying "Well I never used any .NET application before so I never installed the framework for it. So the .NET application needs to not use .NET so I don't need to install the framework"

it has not been dropped, but not using PulseAudio may not be an option any longer if we move Pale Moon to UXP. We'll have to see if we can reasonably keep direct ALSA support in UXP or not. That will be long-term though, and things may have changed by then in Linux land.

Linux Mint is one of the most popular linux distros in the linux world and has been for at least the last 6 years to my knowledge.

Linux Mint is my default distro with the Xfce desktop environment and Pulse Audio is installed by default in Mint Xfce. Pulse Audio doesn't cause me any problems using linux Pale Moon either.

Bottom line is, really, if you want direct ALSA support in UXP applications, you're welcome to offer patches to that effect.

I'd like to see ALSA support continue in Pale Moon also, and I think it's attractive to many who are disappointed by Firefox's move. But it's understandable to require PA if it's too difficult to keep up ALSA support in the future. There are ways for the user to configure PA as a "dumb pipe" to ALSA.

I like your plans for the future and am very hopeful for Pale Moon's continuing example of respecting its users freedom (in an environment that's increasingly focused on bending the user to fit the product).