I used to be a long time user of firefox. Through the years of usage, I’ve gone through good and bad times of firefox performance. There have been multiple times that I gave up on firefox due to disgust at it’s lack of performance and functionality.
Functionality. At the end of the day, that is what it comes down to. Will the product function. If not, it’s quite simple - something else that does function will have to do.
And so after years of running into situations where firefox doesn’t function and chrome does, I gave up the good fight, and went to Chrome, which has been functioning greatly for me for a number of years.
Many times I sought out chat room support to discuss my numerous functionality issues with developers. Usually it devolved into a conversation as to why I was wrong. That’s my biased summary of how the conversation felt to me though. But, when you look at a chart of browser usage, and you see the steady declining line for firefox use, I have to say that the number 1 problem with firefox is that developer mentality I ran into time and time again in the chatrooms - we’re right, the end user is wrong.
Well, the end users have spoken over the years, haven’t they? Firefox use continues to get lower and lower. And it isn’t rocket science - make something that functions, and they’ll use it.
I did have my reasons for resisting Chrome use for years. Google used to have a saying, don’t be evil. However, even when they had that saying, there were many examples of how they are quite evil. To me, the greatest example was how they forced themselves onto many computers against people’s wishes. Working in IT support, we had a time card software that relied on a specific version of Java being loaded onto a computer, and it being used within IE. Chrome came with it’s own version of java, which wasn’t compatible with our time card software. I cannot tell you how many times I received calls on a Monday morning complaining “I can’t approve my time card, it’s not loading the page right”, only to walk over and see the timecard open in a Chrome window. I’d ask the question, when did you install Chrome, and why? And I’d be met with - what’s Chrome? I didn’t do that. And since Chrome would install to a user profile, lack of admin rights didn’t help this. It would install right onto our citrix servers too in the user profile.
Now, although this might not technically meet the textbook definition - a piece of software that is unwanted that automatically appears on a person’s computer that breaks functionality in my book is a virus. And so I’ve considered Google Chrome to be a computer virus ever since those experiences.
I tell this story for you to understand just how much Firefox let me down with their lack of functionality in order for me to abandon it and switch over to a computer virus as my browser.
But once again, I have found out that Google is raming up their evil even more, and plans to disable the ability to block ads soon. Reviewing my options, the simplest option is to switch to Firefox. However - upon reviewing firefox, I’m still left with that one basic concept. Functionality.
Firefox doesn’t have it when it comes to sound.
For some reason, Firefox is stubbornly locked in to only using the Windows sound output setting as the sound output. Has the basic concept of multiple sound devices, and allocating them to different applications, somehow eluded you for this long now? I just don’t understand how that is possible - how every developer of Firefox can be this narrowly minded. In this age of internet streaming, being able to choose a specific sound output from the app is essential. When I am running a stream from streamyard, I need to set the output to a specific output on my device, to feed a separate channel on my board. This way, I’m able to send a specific submix back to streamyard without looping it back to itself.
One possible workaround the lazy devs might point out would be to use the app volume and device preferences within windows to set firefox to use a different output. But this is hardly a real solution, as this then would set all of firefox to use that output, not just my streamyard tab. Which means if during a stream we are discussing a video, and I wish to bring it up and screenshare it, when I do so the other parties within streamyard will not receive the sound back to them.
Currently, Chrome allows me this basic functionality, to set streamyard to a separate output, while leaving the rest of chrome on the default output, to let me properly run sound while streaming. I consulted with streamyard to inquire to this setting, they have made it clear to me this isn’t on their side, this is a lack of functionality on firefox’s part, and they also directed me to view the site https://webcammictest.com/, which also has the same behavior, it will allow setting the mic and speaker settings on Chrome, but only the mic on Firefox.
Please, enlighten me…why have you made Firefox this dysfunctional when it comes to sound, and do you plan to persist in this narrow minded mindset of sound? I would really love to switch back to Firefox - but until you fix this glaring inexcusible bug, I find it impossible to do so.