Courtney, I will try to suggest something. First, I was having problems in the past with Firefox. I use to let mpv play in the background ( a stream of internet radio) and the sound has stuttering and pauses whenever Firefox loaded some pages. I was told to use sndio for mpv as an option with ao=sndio in the mpv.conf. I did this and the problem was gone.
Next, you could try something just to check. It is a shoot in the dark, but I use it for something else. I have an old computer, and the browsing was very slow. The disk ( mechanical) was spinning like hell whenever a page was loaded, both Firefox and Chromium. Looking on internet, I found that browsers are using caching on the disk a lot. I see you are using SSD, but here it is anyway; Do a backup: # cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.install Change the entry for the /tmp partition to look like this: swap /tmp mfs rw,nodev,nosuid,-s=1g 0 0 Reboot in single user mode, using -s at boot prompt and do this on the shell: # mount -uw / #chmod 1777 /tmp # reboot Let it boot normally and issue this inside a terminal: $ XDG_CACHE_HOME=/tmp firefox Then do your job with sound and check for stuttering. If it is fine now, use it like this. If not, just reverse the fstab backup and try something else. Please report here, too :).
