1403944 - Remove built-in Web Audio Editor in favour of WebExtension

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(DevTools Graveyard :: Web Audio Editor, enhancement, P4)

Description

[Soledad Penades [:sole] [:spenades]]

The WebGL Shader Editor is one of our least popular features. But it is also not maintained, and not new features have been added in a while, while bugs and intermittents _do_ happen from time to time.

Additionally, it is built with XUL and it's hard to find people who are proficient on it in order to keep working on it.

This bug is to track:

- potential alternatives in the form of a WebExtension
- migration paths for panel users

Comment 1

[Robin Whittleton]

Web Audio panel or WebGL Shader panel?

Comment 2

[Soledad Penades [:sole] [:spenades]]

Welp, copy pasting. Yes! I meant the Web Audio panel.

Comment 3

[Patrick Brosset <:pbro>]

I just tested the google Audion web extension in Firefox nightly 58, and it appears to be working fine on the surface.
Here's the repo for the extension: https://github.com/google/audion

To make it work in Firefox, you need to:
- install Java
- download the code
- run npm install
- run gulp
- and then point about:debugging's temporary addon loading thing to the build folder

I don't think the extension supports audio node removals though, but other than that, it seems to be very very similar to the Web Audio Editor built-in Firefox DevTools.

Comment 4

[Yulia Startsev [:yulia] OOO until July 2026]

Attachment: Bug 1403944 - Remove Web Audio Editor front and panel; r=vporof

Comment 5

[Yulia Startsev [:yulia] OOO until July 2026]

Attachment: Bug 1403944 - Remove Web Audio Editor actor and spec; r=vporof

Comment 6

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/f1003c2742c2
Remove Web Audio Editor front and panel; r=vporof
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/c8fcdc7c2e0b
Remove Web Audio Editor actor and spec; r=vporof

Comment 7

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/ed77ac3f5af9
Remove Web Audio Editor front and panel; r=vporof
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/6aa5ba09b849
Remove Web Audio Editor actor and spec; r=vporof

Comment 8

[Natalia Csoregi [:nataliaCs]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/ed77ac3f5af9
https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/6aa5ba09b849

Comment 9

[Daniel Seiler]

If AudioN works well for firefox, is it possible to get it published on https://addons.mozilla.org? It seems like google isn't doing that and in a weird twist of history, the chrome people created AudioN in part to get feature parity with the WebAudio Editor, linking back to MDN in their roadmap, which now calls this feature deprecated and replaced by AudioN, but there is no simple way of installing it in Firefox.

I've created an issue in the audion repo for this (https://github.com/google/audion/issues/94) in the hopes that either the Firefox or the Google developers working in the WebAudio space can find a way to make this available again in FF without cloning a github repo, building and sideloading an extension.