Homepod stereo pair used as mac speakers

I am very disappointed in the stereo paired homepods not working together in stereo from my Mac. I can't listen to them as stereo from anything but iTunes. It works great with iTunes but won't work at all from my preferred browser (firefox) or even safari.

Apple is slipping... I spent a lot of money to have homepods as my Mac speakers. You set them up as a pair but when you stream from anything but itunes you have to pick only one of the homepods. They are both named the same so you don't even know if you are picking the left or the right.

I have read about a hack work-around involving 3rd party software. I would do it but to do that you need to disable the stereo pair and set them up separately. Doing this break the stereo working in iTunes. This equipment is to expensive to be this unfriendly to actually use.

I have been an Apple customer for over 30 years. It never occurred to me that it would not work properly from a fully updated Mac Pro. Why Apple didn't do something as simple as having audio jacks on the speakers is mind blowing.