Firefox version 52 users on Linux baffled without sound
Many Linux users, who updated their browser to the latest version- Firefox 52, which was released last week, found that they were not able to play sound on their browser.
Also, to make things even worse, Mozilla decided to drop its support for ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) and requests the Linux users to install the PulseAudio library to support audio playback inside Firefox. Pulse Audio is considered to be of minimum requirement to play any audio on the browser.
ALSA is a software framework included in the Linux kernel that provides an API for sound card drivers. On the other hand, PulseAudio is a modern sound server which finds support on almost all Linux distros, and also on FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and even macOS.
Linux users who use small/old distros are the ones affected mostly. Modern Linux distros come with PulseAudio which is installed by default, although small and minimalistic distros are often released with a built-in ALSA framework. Even the users who have mainstream but very old distributions are facing the problem.
Users, who are frustrated with the lack of sound issues, rebuked the move from Firefox as they claimed that they weren’ t informed about the issue when they updated their browser. Some claim that the Firefox 52 release didn’ t mention anything about ALSA or PulseAudio.
The only way to resolve this problem without installing PluseAudio is by choosing some other browser, or by downgrading to Firefox 52 ESR.
Also, as a heads up, Firefox 53, which is scheduled to be released next month, will not support Linux editions for processors older than Pentium 4 and AMD Opteron.
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