Firefox 34 randomly muting itself
This was not an issue until the recent update about a week ago. After being open for about 5-10 minutes, all sound from the browser will cut off. This includes audio from both Flash and HTML5 videos. Every so often the sound may come back (For instance, if I'm watching a video on Youtube and it's muted while I start the video, if I go to a different segment of the video by clicking the timeline, the sound has what I can only describe as a 1/10 chance of coming back -- sometimes if I keep clicking the timeline I can brute force the sound to start playing once more and the sound will play throughout the rest of the video, but if I click the timeline once more, it has a large chance of muting again).
Restarting the browser fixes the issue temporarily; however, whenever this sound issue arises and I restart the browser, Firefox will always forget the tabs I had opened and give me no option to recover them. This only occurs when sound gets muted. If I restart it when I am not having any sound issues, I get the option to recover my tabs without any problem.
Just to get the obvious out of the way, yes, I've done all of the necessary troubleshooting tests (Making sure I'm getting sound from other programs, making sure Firefox and Adobe Flash Player are not manually muted in Windows' sound mixer, restarted my computer, made sure all necessary scripts are enabled, etc.) Thanks in advance!
All Replies (2)
Hello,
Try Firefox Safe Mode to see if the problem goes away. Firefox Safe Mode is a troubleshooting mode that temporarily turns off hardware acceleration, resets some settings, and disables add-ons (extensions and themes).
If Firefox is open, you can restart in Firefox Safe Mode from the Help menu:
- In Firefox 29.0 and above, click the menu button
, click Help 
and select Restart with Add-ons Disabled.
- In previous Firefox versions, click on the Firefox button at the top left of the Firefox window and click on Help (or click on Help in the Menu bar, if you don't have a Firefox button) then click on Restart with Add-ons Disabled.
If Firefox is not running, you can start Firefox in Safe Mode as follows:
- On Windows: Hold the Shift key when you open the Firefox desktop or Start menu shortcut.
- On Mac: Hold the option key while starting Firefox.
- On Linux: Quit Firefox, go to your Terminal and run firefox -safe-mode
(you may need to specify the Firefox installation path e.g. /usr/lib/firefox)
When the Firefox Safe Mode window appears, select "Start in Safe Mode".
If the issue is not present in Firefox Safe Mode, your problem is probably caused by an extension, theme, or hardware acceleration. Please follow the steps in the Troubleshoot extensions, themes and hardware acceleration issues to solve common Firefox problems article to find the cause.
To exit Firefox Safe Mode, just close Firefox and wait a few seconds before opening Firefox for normal use again.
When you figure out what's causing your issues, please let us know. It might help others with the same problem.
Just gave it a shot, and unfortunately, it seems that the problem still persists even on Safe Mode with no add-ons. Same as it is normally: after approximately 10 minutes of browsing, no sound will output from any Flash or HTML5 elements (Possibly others, but those are the ones I'm generally viewing), and upon restarting Firefox, I am not given an option to restore my tabs from the previous session.