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Comment by indigochill | Hacker News Reader

I generally am on the pro-Firefox, anti-Chrome train, but there is one practical exception: websites that make use of in-browser audio synthesis often (in my experience) just don't work in Firefox.

Audible Genius's Building Blocks course has a in-browser DAW that you need to use Chrome for. Flowkey (browser-based piano lessons) also only works in Chrome, as far as I've been able to figure out.

So to anyone with an inclination, Firefox could use help on that front. Or if someone already knows of a Firefox-based solution, I'd be happy to use it. I just haven't found one yet.

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> websites that make use of in-browser audio synthesis often (in my experience) just don't work in Firefox.

How recently have you tried this? Firefox added AudioWorklet in v76 [1] and it's very well done.

[1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/05/firefox-76-audio-worklets-...

Tried Audible Genius again just now to check, but still isn't supported, although now that I look at the console it looks like this may have something to do with their Meteor and analytics setup, so not audio related.

Tried Flowkey again now as well and although it required the Jazz-MIDI plugin (to permit the browser access to my MIDI controller), with that plugin I was able to use Flowkey in Firefox.

So it looks like my concerns were outdated.

FTR here's my deal breaker with Firefox:

Just tried using it and was pleasantly surprised that it mostly worked fine with DWM (an X11 window manager), and it could play sound from my built-in sound card fine, even though I don't have pulseaudio.

However, once I switched to the external sound card, Firefox wasn't able to produce any sound (tried Youtube and some local videos); so I'll be staying with Chromium, unless some patched version of Chromium (with privacy improvements) makes its way to the Archlinux repos.

For better or worse, Chrome is still the browser to beat when it comes to newest browser APIs. My hobby project is an app that utilizes some of them and more than once I've found myself considering dropping support for other browsers. In principle I love Firefox but at the same time I'll have to wait at least a few months to start using the same APIs.

I mean, youtube doesn't work in firefox well. I can't count the number of times I had to restart the browser to play a youtube video. Google reveals it's not an uncommon issue on OSX. While I hated Chrome from the day one, I recommend it to people...

I watch YouTube exclusively on Firefox and never have a problem (I especially like FF's pop-out video window thing.)

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