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Firefox 57, which is slated for release on November 14, will "only run WebExtensions", according to Mozilla.
This is expected to break compatibility with many existing Firefox extensions, and in many cases there aren't WebExtensions-compatible alternatives available for these extensions.
During some recent discussion at Slashdot, it became clear that some users have nearly all of their extensions classified as "legacy", and susceptible to breakage.
Members of the SoylentNews community, if you use Firefox, how many of your extensions are set to no longer work with Firefox in the near future?
If Firefox 57 breaks compatibility with your existing extensions, will this finally be enough for you to discard Firefox and find an alternative browser to use?
Will this extension breakage, and subsequent loss of users, effectively end the viability of Firefox as a modern web browser?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by TheRaven on Sunday August 13 2017, @04:01PM (3 children)
Linux deserves a lot of the blame. The Linux OSS implementation allowed multiple channels, but only with hardware that did sound mixing. This completely missed the point of a kernel: to provide abstractions for userspace. Only one application could open /dev/dsp and so you needed something in userspace to do the mixing. Unfortunately, GNOME and KDE, in their typical fashion, implemented incompatible ones.
The next version of OSS, OSS 4, did support in-kernel sound mixing, but was proprietary. The reaction of the Linux kernel developers was to replace it with ALSA, which had a lot of extra complexity, was harder to program for, and didn't provide useful OSS compatibility (still no sound mixing).
In contrast, FreeBSD took the last BSD-licensed version of OSS and update it to support the newer interfaces. They added in-kernel sound mixing, so multiple apps could open /dev/dsp and get their own independent channel. No need for any userspace mixing, no need to rewrite existing applications.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @07:28PM (2 children)
I don't think BSD's approach made the difference. If BSD was as popular on the desktop as Linux it would attracted the same shitstains and end up with the same sound server problems. You've still gotta have PulseAudio if you want Skype, etc.
It's hardly fair to blame Linux when half the time the sound server isn't serving the client or the hardware, it's just sitting there in the middle, taking up space. People want to write these deep stacks. Look at Android, with ~120ms latency typical not that long ago, on what is essentially a proprietary stack, the devs just don't care. When they realized this was a problem for musicians, they started targeting 50ms. (Musicians want about 9ms.) As far as latency in sound stacks go, developers by and large don't care, or even when they do, are so out of touch they miss the point.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday August 14 2017, @03:09AM
Skype is a spy tool for En-Ez-Ay that delivers a copy of your face every 5 minutes to their storage. So not much reason to keep it around.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14 2017, @11:35AM
Most places say 20ms is the limit before it becomes audible, but that's end to end. E.g. if you are using a soft synth app, that's 20 ms from the keyboard, through the midi router, through the USB driver into the midi stack, into the app, generating the sound, back out through the sound stack to the line out.
So yeah, 9ms for just the audio stack is probably on the high side.