Data Science is Hard: ALSA in Firefox
(( We’re overdue for another episode in this series on how Data Science is Hard. Today is a story from 2016 which I think illustrates many important things to do with data. ))
In July of 2016, Anthony Jones made the case that the Mozilla-built Firefox for Linux should stop supporting the ALSA backend (and also the WinXP WinMM backend) so that we could innovate on features for more modern audio backends.
The code supporting ALSA would remain in tree for any Linux distribution who wished to maintain the backend and build it for themselves, but Mozilla would stop shipping Firefox with that code in it.
But how could we ensure the number of Firefoxen relying on this backend was small enough that we wouldn’t be removing something our users desperately needed? Luckily :padenot had just added an audio backend measurement to Telemetry. “We’ll have data soon,” he wrote.
By the end of August we’d heard from Firefox Nightly and Firefox Developer Edition that only 3.5% and 2% (respectively) of Linux subsessions with audio used ALSA. This was small enough to for the removal to move ahead.
