Upon upgrading to Fedora 34 I’ve discovered much to my chagrin that … something is really really wrong with my favorite browser – which is firefox.
Since I’ve initially updated via software center instead of fresh install that I usually use – initially suspected that and even continued to do a fresh full- wipe reinstall only to find that issue persisted …
Struggle ensued for about a month where I even considered switching back to chrome, tried installing firefox from repos and flathub, removing all the extensions one by one and reinstalling – all to no help…
Times were bleak and desperate…
Finally – thanks to a friendly irc tip pointing to pipewire being a culprit – I was able to solve it. In case if you don’t know what pipewire is – it’s a new daemon replacing pulseaudio by default on fedora in version 34.
I don’t know why and how and what are the underlying mechanics of it – and i don’t care tbh (or really just don’t have time to care) – I just know firefox is as fast as chrome again once I switched back to pulseaudio.
To switch back to pulseaudion in fedora 34 do this:
sudo dnf swap --allowerasing pipewire-pulseaudio pulseaudio
I hope this helps some strugglers out there 😉
edit: sept 2022 – I have not experienced any of these issues in fedora 35/36 – this seems like was resolved upstream