Mozilla has complained for quite a while that their ALSA backend hasn’t been supported or updated in years, and they don’t have the manpower to do so. (Especially with their marketshare falling below 8%).
So, after calls for people to support it, this is the end result.
It’d be delusional to expect them to support two audio backends, and completely rewrite both of them for multiprocess support, when ALSA is used by less than 1% of users (as seen by the Mozilla hardware survey results), and the work can be used better for the other 99% of users.
Unfortunately, logic and sanity fall apart when you talk to hardcore Linux users and they get on their tirade about FREEDOM!!!! Check out absolutely any systemd thread for more evidence.
Freedom has a high cost - attention, maintenance, and constant vigilance. This is something we are learning all too well in this current political climate in the US. It's something Open Source maintainers are learning as they climb in years and experience and their time becomes more and more precious.
We used to tell people like these folk "Patches welcome," but then we learned that they give us those patches... and literally never maintain any aspect of them, so now we're stuck supporting their useless, broken, out of date features for years on end.
Worse, some of them come with baked in security vulnerabilities, and still get left on by default because next to nobody knows what it actually does. But we sure as hell get yelled at when we try to remove those broken features - it becomes an uphill battle, every time. We've seen it for Linux device drivers for super obscure hardware, we've seen it for features in desktop applications and entire desktop environments, we're seeing it again in web browsers.
If you aren't using PulseAudio, you have fully accepted that you are willing to be on the fringe <0.01% of Linux installs[1], and so you get to keep all of the pieces of your special configuration. Feel free to maintain your patches out of tree, and stop robbing the vast majority of users progress and the maintainer's time. It's your freedom to have the code and do what you want with it - they don't have to merge it into their code and support you for free. Forks welcome.
Mozilla made the right call. Freedom has a price.
[1]: by measure of software that I maintain on Linux - last I checked less than 100 installs reporting usage information use the non-Pulse backend, albeit I accept those same folk are likely the folk that would disable usage reporting, so we can never know with absolute certainty. I can't imagine Mozilla's numbers are greatly different than what I'm seeing.
> (Especially with their marketshare falling below 8%).
Well when they keep alienating their existing user base by chasing after Chrome's tail, and keep spending effort on marketing in the developing world (shades of SJW meddling/signaling in the management, anyone?), while at the same time seem to treat anything but OSX as second fiddle, yeah their market share will tank, and tank hard.
> Mozilla has complained for quite a while that their ALSA backend hasn’t been supported or updated in years, and they don’t have the manpower to do so. (Especially with their marketshare falling below 8%).
What an utterly ridiculous argument. You're implying that everyone using software has to keep track of every single upstream project, their mailing lists and requests. That doesn't even remotely scale on a personal level. There just aren't enough hours in a day to be able to read all those mailing lists, and that's assuming every end user even remotely has the skills to understand what is being discussed anyway.
As an argument, this makes no more sense than "Well it's an open source project, fix it yourself".
This kind of scenario is always going to end up happening.
Mozilla has complained for quite a while that their ALSA backend hasn’t been supported or updated in years, and they don’t have the manpower to do so. (Especially with their marketshare falling below 8%).
So, after calls for people to support it, this is the end result.
It’d be delusional to expect them to support two audio backends, and completely rewrite both of them for multiprocess support, when ALSA is used by less than 1% of users (as seen by the Mozilla hardware survey results), and the work can be used better for the other 99% of users.