1999582 - Short Bluetooth audio hiccup in Firefox when reloading or closing another tab

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1955839

(Core :: Audio/Video: cubeb, defect, P3)

Description

[Alex]

Attachment: MOZ_LOG=cubeb:4 output when an audio hiccup occurs

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:144.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/144.0

Steps to reproduce:

Steps to reproduce:

1. Connect Bluetooth A2DP headphones (AAC codec).
2. Start YouTube Music or YouTube video in one tab, let it play.
3. Open a second tab and load a site (for me, https://de.alpinestars.com/en works the best, but there are more - some Aliexpress pages also trigger a hiccup).
4. Observe up to 1s hiccup in music playback.

On Arch Linux with PipeWire and Bluetooth A2DP output, Firefox playback briefly hiccups (up to 1s pause) whenever another tab in the same browser instance that (probably) has media elements is opened, reloaded, or closed.

This issue occurs only within the same Firefox instance - if I play music in Firefox and reload a tab in Firefox Nightly (or vice versa), there is no hiccup. Using Chromium on the same system does not show the issue.

Speakers (analog output) work fine, the problem happens only with Bluetooth A2DP.

System:

• Dell XPS 15 9570
• Arch Linux, Kernel 6.17.6
• PipeWire 1.4.9 + WirePlumber
• Pixel Buds Pro 2 (A2DP AAC)
• Firefox 144.0.2 (reproducible in Nightly 147.0a1 2025-11-11 as well)

about:support shows:

Audio Backend: pulse-rust

When a tab reloads:

• pw-top shows the Firefox node recreated briefly, or new nodes spawn then vanish.
• a short audio hiccup (up to 1s) occurs in the A2DP output stream.
• no errors in journalctl --user -u pipewire or journalctl --user -f.
• MOZ_LOG=cubeb:4 output is attached.

Actual results:

Brief pause in Bluetooth A2DP audio when another tab in the same instance reloads.

Expected results:

Continuous playback - tab reload/open/close should not interrupt existing audio.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Audio/Video: cubeb' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[John Lin [:jhlin][:jolin]]

Hi Matthew, could you please help have a look? Thanks a lot!

Comment 3

[Matthew Gregan [:kinetik]]

This looks like the same issue as bug 1955839, which is fixed in Firefox 151. Alex, would you mind testing a current Firefox Beta build and letting us know if you're still seeing the issue? Thanks!

Comment 4

[Alex]

(In reply to Matthew Gregan [:kinetik] from comment #3)

This looks like the same issue as bug 1955839, which is fixed in Firefox 151. Alex, would you mind testing a current Firefox Beta build and letting us know if you're still seeing the issue? Thanks!

After trying to reproduce the issue for quite some time in Firefox 151, I didn't hear any hiccups.

In Firefox 150, the non-beta version I currently have installed, it also became much harder to reproduce for some reason, but I was still able to hear a few hiccups - definitely not as many as in Firefox 144, which I had originally installed and listed in the bug description.

Comment 5

[Matthew Gregan [:kinetik]]

Thanks for testing! I'm fairly confident this is the same issue as bug 1955839, so I'll mark this as a duplicate. If you still experience issues with Firefox 151 or later, please let us know.