Blitzortung.org Forum

Since upgrading to Firefox >= 52.0 on Linux sound has stopped working for me on the Blitzortung.org real time lightning maps.

Prior to 52.0 sound worked fine but for the new version I had to install PulseAudio.  On Linux, versions of Firefox before 52.0 used the ALSA sound system and 52.0 and later will only use PulseAudio which is a higher level abstraction above ALSA.  The result was that sound is working in FF in all other respects e.g.  videos, streaming radio stations etc. but not on the BO real time maps.  Very occasionally maybe one time in a 100 or more the click sound is heard for a detected stroke.  On this same machine (running a mutant version of Slackware 14.1) I have tried Palemoon browser and Chromium.  In both cases the sound works normally on the maps.

I am currently using FF 53.0b4 and as I don't like PulseAudio I've uninstalled it and installed the Apulse (https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse) PulseAudio emulator with exactly the same result as above.

From what I can tell the problem seems to be with how the BO maps script interacts with FF for audio.

I have "fixed" this problem by using a custom version of Firefox 52.1.0 ESR compiled by the Slackware maintainers without the PulseAudio dependency.  This will only be a temporary fix until Mozilla removes that compile option in a future version. Hopefully Mozilla will realise the error of their ways and reverse that decision.  Other coming "improvements" are a completely new and less powerful add-on interface which will make most current add-ons inoperative.