Pulseaudio & browsers - anyone got something ELSE working?

[Swift Griggs <swiftgriggs%gmail.com@localhost>]

So, just a few years ago, we had to have flash (a security nightmare) 
setup and working to do things like play a youtube video. That sucked 
because you never knew when someone was going to bend flash over and 0wn 
your system. My best defense was click-to-play plugins so flash only 
loaded when I needed it. That worked, at least. It didn't play nice with 
the sound device and often wouldn't release it until I closed the browser, 
but it was servicable.

Fast forward a few years when sites started to pull their head out of 
their flash and embrace HTML5 and the in-browser streaming video standards 
that had only been sitting there a decade or so. I'm thinking "YEA!" no 
more flash, right? Plus, Gecko browsers are open source, so they ought to 
embrace more than one sound output meathod, right? ESD, Jack1, Jack2, 
Arts, OSS, Alsa, NAS, etc.. WRONG.

Well, I was half right. Sites like Youtube seem to work in just about all 
our Mozilla-based browsers (Seamonkey, Firefox*). However, there seems to 
be NO CHOICE about what kind of sound device to output to. It's Pulseaudio 
or nothing, I guess. Well, my opinion is that Pulseaudio is a miserable 
failure at everything it does, since that's been my experience. I've got 
three NetBSD systems it fails to work on altogether, or has severe 
drawbacks (like it won't release the sound device - EVER, or it won't work 
unless it's run as root, despite 666 perms on the audio devs). Plus, 
nobody seems to want to *fix* Pulseaudio. Anyone who complains is an 
idiot, according to Pottering or his ilk.

Is there ANY way to get sound via a browser without Pulseaudio ? Today I 
resort to downloading with youtube-dl or something similar and playing the 
resulting file with mplayer because at least that gives me enough 
flexibility to choose my sound output and not break it (which Pulseaudio 
does OFTEN by grabbing the sound device, refusing to release it, and being 
unkillable even with kill -9 - must reboot after that).

Is there any other option besides taking more abuse from Pulseaudio or 
doing the plugin-download-play-from-CLI option ? I'm using amd64 and i386 
ports. Is there a version in the panopoly of firefox versions that has 
anything-other-than-pulseaudio as an option for sound output that can 
still do HTML5 video? Has anyone found a formula that works and doesn't 
ruin the sound device until the end of time just because I played one 
HTML5 video?

-Swift

I'm even using SeamlessRDP to run browsers from Windows boxes. Ugh. Bleh. 
Puh. but at least I know 'rdesktop' will release the sound device!