889267 - nsISound is completely broken as of FF22

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Widget: Gtk, defect, P5)

Description

[Mindaugas <LA-MJ>]

As a simple test, open the web console in e. g. about:addons and run:

var soundService = Components.classes['@mozilla.org/sound;1']
	.getService(Components.interfaces.nsISound);
soundService.beep();
// no sound, no exception
// play() doesn't work either

I've found a similar bug but it hasn't had any updates for quite some time and was reportedly fixed (sound used to work just fine couple releases back, plus there is no exception this time): 
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=536996

Comment 1

[Loic]

Did it use to work in previous versions of Firefox?

Comment 2

[Mindaugas <LA-MJ>]

Yes, I do not exactly know when it broke, though.

I am maintaining an add-on which uses the same codebase for Firefox and Chrome but I do more testing on the latter so it's hard to tell when things went wrong but it has worked before for sure. Most probably FF21.

I've asked for feedback and, strangely enough, some add-on users (even on Linux) don't experience the issue while a small portion of the do experience it even on Windows.

As a sanity check I've tested the Audio() object instead and it works just fine.
I'll use it for now but just wanted to report it as a courtesy.

My system info:
Lubuntu 12.10 x86_64
Linux 3.5.0-36-generic
pulseaudio 2.1

Comment 3

[Loic]

On my Win 7 with FF22, your test passes, I hear the beep.

But if you're able to reproduce the issue on your machine, could you use the tool mozregression (see http://harthur.github.io/mozregression/ for details) to find a possible regression range, please (post the changeset of the bisection).

FF21 nightlies started in Jan. 2013 (mozregression --good=2013-01-01).

Comment 4

[Alice0775 White]

Works for me on ubuntu12.04.
http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-release/rev/e55e45536133
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:22.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/22.0 ID:20130618035212

Comment 5

[Mindaugas <LA-MJ>]

OK, I was waiting to get more feedback from users who also reported the issue to me but they don't seem to be willing to contribute:/

I haven't actually used the regression tool because I wanted to first find the actual release that worked manually. I tried beep() untill even with FF18 and I couldn't hear anything.

HOWEVER, I also tried play() of a chrome resource (the thing that prompted me to report the bug in the first place) and it started working in ALL versions all of a sudden (at that point I've had uninstalled/installed a few firefox releases). 

So it must have been an unrelated temporary issue.

So nsISound is not 'completely broken'. It's just beep() that doesn't work for me for some reason. Maybe this is Lubuntu-related

Comment 6

[Mindaugas <LA-MJ>]

nsISound::beep() is still not working here.
nsISound::play() is fine

FF25
Ubuntu 13.10 amd64
Pulseaudio 4.0

Comment 7

[Loic]

Can you try to use the tool mozregression, please.

Comment 8

[Mindaugas <LA-MJ>]

Like I've posted earlier it does not even work in FF18 but I'll ty

Comment 9

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1552613