Google Chrome/Chromium Now Supports PulseAudio

Making news in the browser world this morning is word of Firefox 7 Beta. Firefox 7 has optimized memory usage, improved memory management, enhances Firefox Sync, and other enhancements. But there's also some other interesting news in the browser world for the more technical users and it's concerning Google Chrome/Chromium.

The news today regarding Google's Chrome web-browser, and the open-source Chromium version, is that it finally supports PulseAudio. As of yesterday, PulseAudio sound playback support on Linux was committed to Chromium trunk. It's a preliminary implementation of a PulseAudio sound back-end. Current limitations is that it's stereo audio only right now and that PulseAudio is not yet dynanically linking PulseAudio at run-time if it's available.

Confirmation of PulseAudio support finally coming to Google's web-browser can be found in this bug report.

It's pleasant to see the support of PulseAudio finally, which will hopefully lead to a better web-browser audio experience for most modern Linux distributions that use this open-source audio library, compared to Chrome talking directly to ALSA.