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Comment by kuschku | Hacker News Reader

You could volunteer to rewrite Firefox’s entire ALSA backend to add multiprocess support.

That’s what caused this, because Mozilla doesn’t have the manpower to rewrite two backends, and so had to choose one (with the pulse backend being preferred, as the pulse maintainers help mozilla and fix bugs on their side, while mozilla reports getting no assistance or anything from the ALSA maintainers).

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I would but they'd have to hire me full time. (Yes, I'd be happy to work on other parts of the browser as well.)

Sad reality is that they are trying to not hire competent people while having features implemented well. Mozilla is vastly understaffed for the magnitude of the project.

While I would agree that we are vastly understaffed, we just don't have the resources to pay people to fix everything. We hire lots of extremely talented developers, but like all software projects everything is a tradeoff. We could pay someone to maintain ALSA support, but that would mean other things would not get fixed. Linux users are already a small fraction of the Firefox userbase (despite most Firefox developers using Linux as their main development environment), so how do we justify spending the resources to maintain an alternate audio backend that's only used by a small fraction of our Linux users? It's not very compelling.

If it is such a problem, why not hide the backend behind a nice library instead of a sound server? Say, off the top of my head, libao (after getting Xiph to fix the license), PortAudio, libsoundio, OpenAL and OpenSL come to mind. There are probably more.

I wish I could. but I don't have the knowledge or the time.

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