1306413 - No more audio calls possible on Facebook

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Web Compatibility :: Site Reports, defect)

Description

[Sorin]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/53.0.2785.116 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

After your stupid upgrade to 49.0.1 I can't make audio calls on Facebook any more! 


Actual results:

Facebook error: "Can't make call."
Then "Click the camera and choose Share Devices"
The mic isn't trapped by any other app. Calling works perfectly on Chrome. The only thing that changed was the Firefox update to version 49.0.1.


Expected results:

The calls on Facebook should work.

Comment 1

[Loic]

Can you test with a fresh profile, please.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles

Comment 2

[Randell Jesup [:jesup] (needinfo me)]

I can produce the same error message using Nightly (FF 52) if I remove all cameras from the system.  Sorin: do you have a camera on the system?  Your report implies you don't ("No more audio calls")

49 has a change required for W3 spec compliance to fail requests for Audio+Video if no video source is available; applications are supposed to re-request audio-only.  From the errors and what I see trying it in Chrome, either Chrome isn't following the spec (and facebook isn't as well), or Facebook is reacting differently to the initial failure from both.  Chrome://webrtc-internals in Chrome implies that the application only made a single getUserMedia request, and that implies Chrome isn't following the W3 spec.

Comment 3

[Jan-Ivar Bruaroey [:jib] (needinfo? me)]

As someone who's MBP internal camera is bricked, I can attest that Chrome will return an audio-only stream in response to a video+audio request if there's no camera on the system, which violates the spec.

Comment 4

[Sorin]

(In reply to Randell Jesup [:jesup] from comment #2)
> I can produce the same error message using Nightly (FF 52) if I remove all
> cameras from the system.  Sorin: do you have a camera on the system?  Your
> report implies you don't ("No more audio calls")
> 


No camera in my system, indeed.
I don't know about specs. I know the logical thing: if a video+audio call is requested, and the video source is missing, the audio-only call should work.

Comment 5

[Jan-Ivar Bruaroey [:jib] (needinfo? me)]

Browsers have to follow specs. The API guarantees Facebook that it will get what it asked for, and Facebook asked for both. Facebook need to update their code to check what the user has and decide what it wants.

For an example, see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25308486/make-video-stream-optional-in-getusermedia/33770858#33770858

Comment 6

[Jan-Ivar Bruaroey [:jib] (needinfo? me)]

I recommend the second answer there, which is from me, but either approach will work.

Comment 7

[Maire Reavy [:mreavy]]

I've reached out to Facebook and their video calling team is aware of the problem.  I expect they will push out a solution soon, and we'll be following up to help make sure it happens.

Comment 8

[Mike Taylor [:miketaylr]]

Thanks Maire, setting to [sitewait].

Comment 9

[Maire Reavy [:mreavy]]

I received an update from Facebook today:  They have a fix which they have started to roll out to their users.  Per their normal process, they expect all users to have the fix within the next week or two.

Comment 10

[[e-mail]]

Hi, guys. Does anyone have any updates on this? It's almost one month since https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1306413#c9

Maybe someone could bug the Facebook team?

Comment 11

[Sorin]

So is it safe now to upgrade to Firefox 50.1.0?
Has this matter been solved yet?

Comment 12

[[e-mail]]

(In reply to Sorin from comment #11)
> So is it safe now to upgrade to Firefox 50.1.0?
> Has this matter been solved yet?

Nope, still doesn't work for me.

Comment 13

[Maire Reavy [:mreavy]]

Tested this again today and it now works for me(!)  So the fix is definitely rolling out (and may even have rolled out to everyone at this point).  Is anyone still seeing problems?

Comment 14

[[e-mail]]

Yeah, I can confirm it works for me too now!

Comment 15

[Loic]

Let's close it.

Comment 16

[Mike Taylor [:miketaylr]]

This is great -- big thanks to Facebook for the fix.

Comment 17

[Sorin]

Neah... The bug still is! And is not! 
A Firefox user can try in vain to call and respond on Facebook, if he/she doesn't know of the very well hidden trick to click on the very small information icon ("Show site information") and manually permit Facebook to use the computer's mic and camera. I spent a long time to find that solution in other discussion threads. 
What regular user of Firefox ever checks that icon? What space entity will guide him/her to click on that and set the permission for Facebook?
Firefox designers should make it all more friendly to the regular user. (Which I think I am not ;) )

Comment 18

[Loic]

(In reply to Sorin from comment #17)

> Firefox designers should make it all more friendly to the regular user.
> (Which I think I am not ;) )

It's not the purpose of this bug which related to an issue in FB code. Feel free to open a new bug report.