I'm not totally sure what Firefox did here, but requiring libpulse isn't the same as requiring PulseAudio. And the comments in that linked issue suggest that t

I'm not totally sure what Firefox did here, but requiring libpulse isn't the same as requiring PulseAudio. And the comments in that linked issue suggest that this merely introduces a required dependency on libpulse. The standard Chromium package on Arch Linux requires libpulse, but I run it just fine on my laptop with no PulseAudio daemon. It seems like libpulse will fall back to ALSA if the PA daemon isn't running. edit: disclaimer: I know very little about audio on Linux, merely describing my own experience and speculating wildly.