No Sound In Firefox Web Browser

This post was originally published on January 15, 2019
The latest update to this post was made 6 years ago.

No Sound In Firefox Web Browser

It took a while to figure this one out.  All other Windows apps have sound…  Youtube videos play fine in Chrome, Internet Explorer and even Edge…  But Firefox is completely silent…  I went though the typical troubleshooting steps…  Cleaned cache, uninstalled/re-installed, etc…  None of this worked, but the fix turned out to be pretty simple, here are the steps:

STEP 1 – Make sure you are running a current version of Firefox.  Older versions have compatibility issues with some of the newer streaming audio and video protocols.  

• Click the 3 bars in the upper right corner of Firefox, choose ‘Help’ -> ‘About Firefox’. 
• It will show the current version and if behind, it will auto download the needed update(s).
• If you do have updates, let them run, restart Firefox and continue to run this process until this screen says ‘Firefox it up to date’.

Image : Make sure Firefox is up to date

STEP 2 : Change the security sandbox settings…

• In the address bar, enter configuration mode, by typing in about:config and press enter.
  
   
• You might get a warning about voiding your warranty, accept the risk 🙂
  
   
• In the search box, enter the keyword sandbox, then change the value of security.sandbox.content.level – we found a value of 2 works well.
  

FYI – The original value on our install was ‘5’ – this was changed to ‘2’.  There are no ‘save’ buttons, the changes are saved when changed automatically.

STEP 3 – Close Firefox and re-open it.  Try your video again, there should be sound!

Tags: #techsupport #mozilla #firefox #youtube