According to reports, many Firefox users on Linux OS that have updated their browser to version 52 have no sound. We have to mention that this update has been released last week and since then, there were more and more users complaining about this problem.
It seems that this issue has occurred because Mozilla has stopped supporting ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture), which means that the Linux users will need to install the PulseAudio library in order to support audio playback inside Firefox browser.
Unfortunately, Mozilla has not warned its users about this, even if some engineers have talked about imposing AudioPulse as a minimum requirement for Firefox. However, they’ve talked about this in a Google Groups topic back in July 2016.
When the Linux users have updated their Firefox to version 52, they have not been warned about what was about to happen. Users claim that Mozilla should have warned them regarding this problem, as most of them would have stopped the update.
In fact, there were some Linux users who asked Mozilla engineers to continue the support for ASLA, but the answer was “That isn’t going to happen. Sorry.”
Downgrading Firefox Or Install Another browser
To fix this problem without having to install AudioPulse on your Linux computer is quite simple. You will either have to downgrade back to Firefox version 52 ESR or to install another browser.
To make things even worse, the Firefox version 53 that will be released sometime next month will drop support on Linux OS for processors older than AMD Opteron and Pentium 4. Linux users are not very happy about the way Firefox treated them lately and this is the reason why most of them will just switch to another popular mobile browser.
Are you using Mozilla Firefox on your Linux machine? What are your thoughts about Mozilla’s decision to drop Advanced Linux Sound Architecture support on Firefox?
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