Firefox Goes PulseAudio Only, Leaves ALSA Users With No Sound

That's it, i'm going to write my own browser.
If Terry Davis can write an OS in 13 years I can write a browser in 2.
I have so much spare time on my hands, I'll fuckin do it.
It'll be such a marvelous browser, you'll shit your pants while crying in awe when you first open it.

For now, I'm setting emerge to not compile firefox past version 51, downloading emacs, and starting to read C documentation.
What was the last good firefox version?

You can enable ALSA with a compile flag, the outrage is stupid.

How do you know? Gentoo hasn't released Firefox 52 except for the binary version.

I think a better option at this point would be bolting a javascript interpreter on netsurf, or adding ff privacy addon-like functionality to one of the webkit browsers

It would probably be better to come up with a new "HTML-like" standard that is a subset of HTML. Or maybe just re-implement old HTML versions.

go away and never come back

You should just join the Pale Moon team and help make it all it can be.

also >inb4 muh hiding referers
copy and paste the fucking link or disable referers in your browser

Fuck these CIA niggers, I'll make make own browser from scratch.

Nobody's going to use it without the add-ons that made Firefox great.

No surprises here

You can make it in less than 13 months.

Ill just build into the browser clones of the 3 plugins that should have been already included in firefox: Tree Style Tab, uBlock Origin, and HTTPS Everywhere. All other plugins besides those are either bullshit or to fix flaws inherent to firefox.

...

Anyone else remember when sjwfox removed gopher protocol support for no reason at all other than that it was an "attack vector"?

There's no corporation more disgusting than mozilla. Their anti-user decisions have been piling up for years. Now they're just riding the wave of popularity based on the fact that they once were the only alternative to IE. But that's not the case anymore, and their reign will end soon.

V I V A L D I

fuck off with your gook-ware

So what am I supposed to use now? Webkit pulls tons of cancer (especially webkit-gtk) and retarded deps (fucking ruby?), same for Chromium (and it's botnet).
Everything is shit.

He isn't forcing you to be a furfag, you fucking autist.

*yiffs*

being a furfag means you have a gay mind
a gay mind is a feminine mind
femininity's traits include unstability, irrationality, and uncreativeness, and an overall dullness
not someone I want to work for a a couple of years for free

I'll just do my own shit

This is on par with "Linux has vulnerabilities therefore it's even worse than Windows". Stop being so hysterical.

Modern web browsers are as complex as GUI toolkits. Enjoy taking 10 years to mature your browser.

Non-sequitur

Shhhh, goyim! We don't want to remind people there's an alternative to the bloated web of exploitation.

Still needs mouse gestures, download statusbar, Greasemonkey, and a session manager before you can make that claim.

Lynx, Links, ELinks, Links+, w3m, netrik, retawq, Dillo. Maybe even wget, curl, ftp (OpenBSD), telnet to port 80...

Kill yourself.

JACK is still supported. Keep Lennart Poettering's massive attack surface off your machines, and use something with actual low-latency.

They removed gopher because that function is easily implemented as an extension.

I do not enable sound in browser anyway. It has no place in Web.

dom.audiochannel.mutedByDefault = true FTW

Does that prevent audio fingerprinting though? They can still generate sound data in your browser to see what kind of drivers (and possibly hardware?) you're using.

Disable Javascript. Problem solved.

Not always an option because having a bloated website that only works with all the bloat enabled is the new mark of quality.

Do you want fingerprinting or do you want privacy? If you want privacy, disable Javascript.

Wait, what?
I'm using FF 52 on Arch without any pulseaudio shit installed and I have sound just fine.

Once Firefox e10s (Electrolysis) with sandboxing is enabled by default, every Firefox content process will be independent and restricted.

Most ALSA devices cannot handle multiple open. And the ALSA solution, dmix, requires shared memory which is a thing sandboxes do not really want to have, and dmix does not understand sandboxes, so it would probably have to be forked and modified.

So Firefox can write their own sound server to get sound data from each independent content tab, or blow huge holes in the sandboxes for ALSA dmix, or they can just use the sound server that already exists and is used by 98% of Linux desktop users: PulseAudio.

Let me put it in nigger monkey brain terms:

Furfaginess is a sign of being an unstable fuck
Unstable fucks are miserable to work with
I''d rather start my own shit because it will give me more control and it will be more challenging.

How hard can it be, it's just a 2d interface which interprets html4, html5, and javascript. There's tons of documentation on other browsers and web toolkits you can use (webkit).

I want to use the web as well though.

That's because they enable ALSA, with ac_add_options --enable-alsa
git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=packages/firefox
This won't be possible for much longer. 52 is also an Extended Support Release so you can use it for a bit longer and it should support ALSA for its lifetime.

Or they can use any of the available libraries that have support for number of backends on multiple OSes. Then they could get rid of everything else, including Windows and OSX specific stuff and leave the hard stuff to a library which has that as it's goal, instead of reinventing the wheel.

b..but who will make emoji featuring PoC if not the brave souls at Moz://a?

ok i should have listened, forcing dependencies is a mistake in it's own right when pulseaudio doesn't even replace alsa

You can use youtube-dl to download audio and video from a lot of sites, you can also just open the page link with mpv and it should work on most cases. For streaming shit like Twitch there is streamlink.
The only inconvenience is if your distro doesn't make a pulseaudio free package then you will have to make your own package or use the binary straight from the mozilla website.

Or switch to a sane distro.

If the contributors to your sane distro actually wanted to maintain the ALSA backend, this change would not be necessary.

Funny how basically all of the changes autistic screeching happens over are easily solved if someone steps up and becomes a maintainer. ALSA devs didn't respond to emails. PulseAudio devs were more than helpful in Firefox's slight refactor. That's all it boils down to.

I disable it just for shutting off these stupid autoplay sounds on pages pre-emptively.

wtf I hate alsa now

...

Please insert the disk labelled "CHKPRVLG" into Drive A:

SeaMonkey?

Webkit is unmaintained.
Also, see:
marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=146309133207304&w=2
My solution:
(I'm posting here with Links+ and simply avoid places that need JS)

M8, Seamonkey has always been retarded, most of its userbase is hipster.

Pulseaudio probably has a "feature" which allows all audio to be captured by systemD.
Good thing I stopped using firefox 2 years ago.

I refuse to use anything created by pottering or anything that funds pottering.

Now THIS is autism

I'm gonna keep telling y'all
rekonq u p z i l l a

Does pulse depend on systemd?
neither distro I have installed lists systemd as a dependency, but people seem to be talking like it is.

pulse is required as dep by gnome which requires systemd

how is that relevant

dunno mang but gnome users by default have systemdicks and pulse. people just mention systemd because it's made by the same guy who also made pulse which is poettering

That's not what hard dependency means fuckwit.

Then you must accept fingerprinting. This is the reality of Javascript.

Will those libraries support the sandboxing of multiple audio streams? Remember that shared memory is not allowed in here. I'd like to know any general library that does this right now.

No, but with the autistic screeching you'd think it did.
PulseAudio is fine. Unless you're on an audio workstation, and then you'd be better off using JACK for the audio work in any case.

>>>/out/

lol

moz://a foxfire™™

Someone at Mozilla is trying REALLY hard to kill the project.

moz://a furryfox 69 Jenner Edition: Check your pronouns 2.0

Same.

That sounds too hilarious to be true. Source?

Am I autistic if seeing portage output makes me want to reinstall Gentoo?

No. I actually find myself emerge -p'ing (--pretend) different packages just to see what dependencies they pull, what the USE flags are etc.
The comfiest package manager

Wait, I'm dumb, how does this make a hard dep on systemd?

It doesn't. It's only a hard dep on pulseaudio, which is bad enough.

Why is shared memory not allowed for Audio but for Video? Shared Memory is used for Communicating with the Wayland Compositor and X.org also has a shared memory extension ( which can be used by gdk for improved performance ), sounds like a weak argument.

Is there any Gecko or non Chrome/Chromium based browser that supports uMatrix, uBlock, self destructing cookies and https everywhere?
The last time I tried SeaMonkey none of these extensions worked.

You're only autistic if you use paludis.

i never used audio in firefug anyway. why would you want your commercial viewing memeware to be able to make sounds?

pale moon maybe

Seamonkey uses it's own code, you can disable the stuff you don't need, it uses less RAM, and most add ons work. It's linux build sucks horsedick, though.

Why do you believe shared memory is allowed for video? Firefox doesn't need to write a server to run multiple video streams simultaneously as they would have done for audio. If it doesn't support Firefox's goal of sandboxing the resource access of a Firefox process, then it is unsuitable for Firefox's new direction for security. Pulseaudio fixes all of Firefox's audio and security problems.

wew

Slack ?

Teach us your ways.

It's not about being allowed or not, it is essential for displaying Graphics since in the *nix World the Window Manager/Compositor is a separate Process. Because of this they cannot dissallow Shared Memory completely and instead have to Sandbox access to the underlying Graphics API, now why can't they do the same for Audio? Finally I would ask you why you think Pulseaudio works without shared memory?

( from 0pointer.de/blog/projects/when-pa-and-when-not.html )

Why would you suggest dmix's need for shared memory is somehow special, pulseaudio uses shm, jack uses shm, wayland uses shm, gdk/x11 uses shm most of the time.

WAT

FreeBSD port.
freshports.org/www/firefox

OSS? i actually have /dev/dsp on my gentoo installation, i think its because i compiled kernel with OSS for some older linux games.

lel
install gentoo or apulse instead of shitting up this board with your autistic screeching
or better yet, go help maintain the ALSA backend
protip: you won't, because incompetence

its a good change. i dont want sounds from my browser and have already enabled dom.audiochannel.mutedByDefault

hows qutebrowser

Pretty good. Has built in adblocking. Just wish I could select things to block that it misses, and wish it had addon support. Otherwise it works well

LENNART
E
N
N
A
R
T

yeah i like using abp to block images I don't like

does it have js blocking plugins?

Seems like FreeBSD

FreeBSD is life.

FreeBSD is love.

its fucking awful, qtwebkit is the trashest tier. QtWebEngine should bring improvements if it ever moves over.

No. That's another thing I miss when I use it. When it finally gets addon support it will be my main browser.

It does use qtwebengine according to the changelog

qutebrowser.org/CHANGELOG.html

yeah its being integrated slowly, it'll probly end up stable soon enough.

fine I'll just use google chrome :(

github.com/annulen/webkit/wiki/Use-cases-of-QtWebKit

Castrate yourself.

yeah most people say, just use mutt instead or whatever mail client you can use

way to get *BSD users fucked

...

Speaking of which, why can't we make webpages with something like PDF? Would be nice to have a markup language that is basically a vector image format with text and embeding.

Wrong. Mozilla are updating Firefox so that it runs each tab in their own security sandbox. Audio wasn't a problem when Firefox was a single process and they all shared the same Gecko engine. This new direction is a problem for ALSA because ALSA wasn't designed to run more than one program on the ALSA device which means by default, only one tab is able to run sound. There is a way of having multiple process with sound in ALSA call Dmix. Mozilla have decided that Dmix was not suitable for their new direction in Firefox. There is a suitable solution for this and that solution is Pulseaudio which was designed to mix sound like Dmix does but it does it in a way that Mozilla approves.

Why not just send audio from tab processes to a main process via some pipes, and mix it there? Then backend doesn't matter at all.

You can always configure pulseaudio not to hijack control of whole alsa, or use apulse (though I don't know how well it works for firefox/thunderbird).

That's pretty much how Dmix works and Mozilla decided this approach was not correct for Firefox. It has something to do with minimizing the amount of shared memory that's visible from inside the sandbox.

Works on my machine

ALSA isn't a problem when Chromium uses seccomp mode 2. Firefox is just shit.

They did, it's called libpulse.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

OP IS A MASSIVE FAGGOT
I REPEAT, OP IS A MASSIVE FAGGOT

ABANDON THREAD

It works fine with bare ALSA you fucking spergs. You only need libpulse which is a thin wrapper library that falls back to ALSA or even OSS when that's compiled in when no PA server is available.

Gas yourselves.

...

Contribute to qutebrowser.

I have no issue with PA but a forced dep is a cock move.

...

I can install Firefox with alsa and no pulse on Gentoo with EXTRA_ECONF="--disable-pulseaudio --enable-alsa" emerge firefox

Gentoo master race.

FreeBSD is SJW
>>>/oven/

Doesn't just USE=-pulseaudio work?
Either way, I hope the jackaudio backend will remain. I have the impression that mixing or sandboxing shouldn't be a problem with it.

...

Every system should have at least a ports system, the choice of both binaries and source should be the standard. Gentoo has always seemed alright to me, for everything else you can always install pkg-src.

You can compile alsa support in right now. If they're not supporting it anymore, you probably wont be able to in the future, though, right? It'll eventually break.
I can agree source+binary should be standard I Just wish there was a distro that did that well.

kill me

You can just maintain your own version of the pkgbuild. Anyways I don't even think this is a problem on arch, libpulse0 should (in theory) not depend on the pulseaudio daemon and should just fall back to alsa.
This is much ado about nothing. Just autists being autists. If libpulse0 depends on the daemon on your system, it's a bug, or unsupported, and if it's unsupported it's no one's problem but your own for having an autistic setup that could break at any time.

You can use same argument for http. No, they just want to deprecate gopher and slam their big package in your face.

99% of the browser is easily implemented as an extesion, you retard. The 1% being the extension system itself.

Someone at cuckfox really wants to make it bad on purpose.

Some day it will be revealed that systemd is either backdoored or part of some sort of EEE scheme.
If I'm still alive, that day I will have a heartly chuckle and a beer to all the fucking morons that didn't see it coming a mile away.

KDE just looks too amateurish.

Firefox is all about web pages and web technologies, not Gopher.

No, it isn't. Dmix maps the card's DMA buffer into address spaces of all processes outputting sound and has them mix their streams into that shared buffer concurrently using atomic read-modify-write instructions. This design is extremely efficient (it avoids pipes, memory copies and an extra process for mixing), but it comes at the price of allowing all processes access to the mixed output. This is fine for local apps, which need to be trusted to run anyway - but you don't want a random web script to escape its VM by exploiting a browser bug and start recording everything your sound card plays.
A separate, secure mixer is the correct approach for a limited trust application like a web browser.

FTFY

I can confirm this is exactly how it works on Arch. I have libpulse installed for the few apps that need it and no PulseAudio server whatsoever. Everything works splendidly on top of bare ALSA.
What kind of retarded distribution names the client lib package "libpulse0"?

No it's not, ftp:// is supported. They just want to deprecate Gopher because it's too easy/simple and they love to overcomplicate everything. It's a painful thorn in the side that reminds people of how the web used to once be much simpler and didn't need monster-size complicated browsers to render 20 MB of JS on each click.
Probably FTP will be deprecated soon enough, for "security" reasons though. Use SSL everywhere or you can be spied on. ;^)