Firefox 52.0

Posted Mar 9, 2017 19:37 UTC (Thu) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767)
In reply to: Firefox 52.0 by tuna
Parent article: Firefox 52.0

Not amusing. All these years later, Pulse is *still* causing unnecessary strife for some. And all because some of the cheapest audio cards of the 1990s couldn't do hardware mixing of streams. I disable Pulse, as well.

Firefox 52.0

Posted Mar 9, 2017 19:59 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

"And all because some of the cheapest audio cards of the 1990s couldn't do hardware mixing of streams"

That's not why it is default in so many distros.

Firefox 52.0

Posted Mar 10, 2017 14:48 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (19 responses)

s/some of the cheapest cards of the 90s/all but a handful of audio devices ever sold, including today/

Firefox 52.0

Posted Mar 10, 2017 20:34 UTC (Fri) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link] (18 responses)

Quite untrue. Even in the 90s I never had a card/driver combo that couldn't mix streams without a sound server. And I've supported a lot of sound cards over the decades.

Firefox 52.0

Posted Mar 10, 2017 22:11 UTC (Fri) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] (17 responses)

Sounds like you only bought the most expensive cards. I owned many SoundBlaster 64s, SoundBlaster 128s and various onboard sound cards and none of them supported hardware mixing.

Firefox 52.0

Posted Mar 11, 2017 13:22 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (16 responses)

Quite. And since then, what *everyone* has, because it's on essentially every non-server motherboard out there and even a few server mobos, is Intel HDA. And most implementations of that don't support hardware mixing.

The last mixing-capable card I had was back in the late 90s. I don't miss it: all its features are implementable in software (PA, Timidity, etc) and the HDA sounds every bit as good as the more expensive mixing-capable card did.

Firefox 52.0

Posted Mar 11, 2017 19:38 UTC (Sat) by ajmacleod (guest, #1729) [Link] (15 responses)

I also suffered from horrible sound cards for a long time... the good news is that ALSA can do software mixing too (granted, only for the past decade or so IIRC, but...)

Firefox 52.0

Posted Mar 11, 2017 22:54 UTC (Sat) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link] (14 responses)

ALSA dmix?

It has ALL the problems of sound servers, does a crappy job of mixing, and has worse latency than PulseAudio, at least when PA is asked to provide low latency instead of power efficiency.

Firefox 52.0

Posted Mar 13, 2017 14:26 UTC (Mon) by ajmacleod (guest, #1729) [Link] (13 responses)

Even in theory it seems unlikely that adding another layer of bloat is going to be more efficient, but more to the point my own experience is that ALSA's own mixing is far more reliable and efficient than with PA added to the equation; with PA my sound was often choppy and late - when it worked.

Firefox 52.0

Posted Mar 13, 2017 15:15 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (10 responses)

...And I can add my own anectdotes about problems I've experienced with ALSA's dmix plugin and how PA worked better, even in its early days.

And incidentally, ALSA's dmix plugin, by your definition, is "another layer of bloat"

Firefox 52.0

Posted Mar 13, 2017 15:44 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

It doesn't matter how well PulseAudio works today. It does solve real-world problems that people have, and in my experience it is fine. (For example, my mobile phone uses it and has no problems moving audio streams between the device and a Bluetooth headset even in mid-call.) There was, however, a time when PulseAudio (on Ubuntu) worked really badly, mostly due to bugs in the underlying ALSA drivers, and even though that wasn't really PulseAudio's fault in the first place it gets trotted out again and again whenever someone mentions PulseAudio or systemd or Lennart Poettering or anything that people think is new and therefore bad. “Remember PulseAudio!” is the generic anti-innovation argument.

It is a well-known fact that software never improves from the point in time when it was first looked at. Therefore to some people something like System-V init is perfect because we've already had 25 years to shake out the bugs, but something like PulseAudio is an unmitigated disaster that is not worth one's time even 10 years later, no matter how much work other people have put into it in the meantime.

Firefox 52.0

Posted Mar 14, 2017 23:42 UTC (Tue) by ajmacleod (guest, #1729) [Link] (8 responses)

DMix is part of ALSA, not an entire kitchen-sink-and-the-toilet-too additional sound server. The difference is obvious; is the fact that audio on my system works perfectly well without PA and that I therefore don't want to be obliged to use PA it really so offensive?

Firefox 52.0

Posted Mar 15, 2017 3:27 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> is the fact that audio on my system works perfectly well without PA and that I therefore don't want to be obliged to use PA it really so offensive?

No, what is offensive is the expectation that other folks should write, support, or otherwise maintain software for you.

Firefox 52.0

Posted Mar 15, 2017 8:53 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (6 responses)

is the fact that audio on my system works perfectly well without PA and that I therefore don't want to be obliged to use PA it really so offensive?

Being forced to use PulseAudio may be offensive to you but being forced to not use PulseAudio may be offensive to Firefox developers. Guess who has more clout as far as the development of Firefox is concerned?

Firefox 52.0

Posted Mar 15, 2017 15:19 UTC (Wed) by ajmacleod (guest, #1729) [Link] (5 responses)

Oh, I'm happy to admit that they have all the clout. What they won't have at this rate is users and hence significance. FF marketshare and "brand awareness" is already rapidly disappearing; the more they disappoint or annoy their long term users and promoters in the community, the faster that will happen.

Firefox 52.0

Posted Mar 15, 2017 16:03 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (3 responses)

While FF's marketshare and "brand awareness" are rapidly disappearing, it has nothing to do with users like you or I, running a niche OS comprising 2% of the theoretical userbase.

FF is losing on Windows to IE/Edge, on Android to Chrome, on Apple to Safari/IOS, because the default is MoreThanGoodEnough(tm) -- and it's main differentiating feature these days, (freedom/principles/whatever) doesn't actually matter to the 98%, at least not when compared to convenience, proprietary plugins, and having to deal with breakages caused by folks not testing on anything other than Webkit-derived browsers.

This is the old MS/Netscape battle all over again..

No amount of promotion by the likes of you or I will make one iota of difference in the face of that tide.

Firefox 52.0

Posted Mar 15, 2017 22:17 UTC (Wed) by ajmacleod (guest, #1729) [Link] (2 responses)

The thing is that the only reason FireFox ever really gained any marketshare in the first place was because of people like us who got other, less technically minded, people using it. I am responsible for the desktop that a lot of users see, and despite most of my users being on Windows they aren't using IE or Edge because they won't be able to find them easily; they have the browser of my choice set as their default (well, in between MS changing it every second "update", but..)

I would disagree then that FF's brand awareness or user base has nothing to do with me - it does, because without me an awful lot of people (clearly not millions, but at least several hundred) would probably never have used FF in the first place.

I know this particular change does not affect Windows users (at least, not on anything post XP) but it's the final straw for me in the way Mozilla has managed/handled/"interacted" with their user community which means I'll be switching most of my Windows based users from here on too.

Simply locking down the bug to make sure the real scale of the frustration at this decision is not seen is a prime example of their approach, and I don't like it; I'm not going to issue death threats, I don't personally have the competence to rewrite FF sound handling on Linux so I'll just go elsewhere and leave them to their echo chamber.

Firefox 52.0

Posted Mar 16, 2017 15:18 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> The thing is that the only reason FireFox ever really gained any marketshare in the first place was because of people like us who got other, less technically minded, people using it

....And the plain fact that it was objectively _Much Much Much Much_ better than IE, which by that point had stagnated for many years. That was the key to Firefox's massive uptake.

Today, Firefox is more or less on par with everything else, ahead in some respects, behind in others. However, Mozilla still lacks the platform bundling advantage (and free "download Firefox" blurbs on half the web...) which puts it at a considerable disavantage in the long run.

And yes, how Firefox handles sound on Linux doesn't matter one bit.

Incidently, what are you going to do instead? Switch to Chrome, which is objectively much worse on the social/freedom/ignoring users scale?

Firefox 52.0

Posted Mar 16, 2017 15:42 UTC (Thu) by ajmacleod (guest, #1729) [Link]

Even when FF was genuinely miles better than the alternative, most users didn't really know how or even particularly care - in those days in fact there were still plenty of horrible websites out there which didn't work well or sometimes at all with anything other than IE, and a non-technical user would just assume FF was to blame.

Personally, I'm looking at PaleMoon again. I'm definitely not 100% happy about switching, in fact I'd much rather not; but at this stage I think it's the least bad option.

It's a pity Opera hadn't done something more than reskin Chrome, that might have been worth considering - Vivaldi was too awful for words on the few occasions I've tried it.

For other people's Windows desktops (and possibly those on Linux) it'll be Chrome from here on in - it works about as well as Firefox on Windows, privacy & monoculture issues excepted. If Mozilla aren't interested keeping their users happy I don't see why I should assist them in their battle for relevance.

Firefox 52.0

Posted Mar 15, 2017 16:21 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

PulseAudio is part of virtually all mainstream Linux distributions and by now it does tend to work pretty well. A dependency on Pulseaudio is unlikely to hurt the popularity of Firefox on Linux in any significant way simply because nearly every potential Firefox user runs PulseAudio already, possibly without even really noticing because it just does what it is supposed to do.

Presumably people like you who prefer ALSA without PulseAudio could band together and recompile Firefox such that it doesn't use PulseAudio (it's a compile-time switch). It is a bit of a hassle but at least you would be scratching your own itch. IMHO, insisting that everyone else ought to forego PulseAudio-by-default in Firefox just because you personally don't happen to like it is much more of an imposition.

Firefox 52.0

Posted Mar 14, 2017 7:46 UTC (Tue) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link] (1 responses)

> Even in theory it seems unlikely that adding another layer of bloat …

And dmix is just made of pixies, or what?

Firefox 52.0

Posted Mar 15, 2017 10:00 UTC (Wed) by cladisch (✭ supporter ✭, #50193) [Link]

> > Even in theory it seems unlikely that adding another layer of bloat …
>
> And dmix is just made of pixies, or what?

With dmix, all applications map the hardware buffer directly into their own address space, and mix the samples into the buffer with (the equivalent of) atomic adds. This avoid a separate sound server process/thread, and thus has 42% more pixiness.

And nothing is free: all applications must use the same sample rate/format and buffer size, so one fixed value must be chosen in advance.