We know that unsolicited volume can be a great source of distraction and frustration for users of the web. So we are making changes to how Firefox handles playing media with sound. We want to make sure web developers are aware of this new autoplay blocking feature in Firefox.
Starting with the release of Firefox 66 for desktop and Firefox for Android, Firefox will block audible audio and video by default. We only allow a site to play audio or video aloud via the
HTMLMediaElementAPI once a web page has had user interaction to initiate the audio, such as the user clicking on a “play” button.
Good move, and long overdue. Autplaying video isn’t just a mere annoyance – it’s incredibly rude, obnoxious and desrespectful.
I bet Mozilla will make an exception for their sponsors.
Please, if you are going to troll be better at it.
How is that trolling? Didn’t they recently experience backlash over a sneaky-snake browser extension promoting a TV sitcom?
Haven’t you learned? Anyone who dares disagree with another person’s viewpoint is a troll now. We just have to wait for Oxford and Webster to redefine the word.
Oh wait… Mozilla is making exceptions for their sponsors (who ever they are). You confirmed that? Source?
I am disagreeing with you? How does one disagree with something someone totally made up based on nothing?
We need the word troll to be redefined? Hmmmm
2a : to antagonize (others) online by deliberately posting inflammatory, irrelevant, or offensive comments or other disruptive content
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/troll
Your comment wasn’t meant to be inflammatory? OK than…
They were promoting a TV sitcom? They must have been paid well for that. Oh wait… There was no payment. Mozilla had a relationship with the TV show and thought it would be something that would be FUN. The facts are one needed to have studies enabled to even get it, the user needed to enable it for it to run, and if enabled it collected no data. Oh no!
Should Mozilla have installed an extension on people’s browser without their consent? No, but it was harmless. I can list 1000’s of things Google, Facebook, and Microsoft do that are much worse than this. Let’s get our priorities straight here.
I think creating a list of 1000’s of things Google, Facebook, and Microsoft do that are much worse is an excellent idea. It’d be a very useful news article, and (if it’s updated regularly) would make it significantly easier for consumers to keep track.
That is one of my biggest pet peeves about the “modern” web.
I wonder why it took so long, and why chrome doesn’t do it as well. It is such a nuisance and I don’t know anyone who approves of autoplay.
hdjhfds,
This has been request and ignored for many many years, I suspect the answer to “why now” is that while mozilla were fine with ignoring their users for years, someone at mozilla had the problem too and so finally something was done. No doubt my view is cynical, but probably true.
Also, I think many people could be disappointed to learn that they’re not blocking autoplay completely, just “audio autoplay”.
This doesn’t address the needs of people who don’t want autoplay period (it will still waste bandwidth and cpu resources). We had a discussion on osnews about this not too long ago, but I’m having trouble finding it now.
WordPress lacks a comment search feature, I used that quite a bit on the old site to refer to older posts. I probably won’t be referring to any older posts any more, haha.
Yup, this wordpress thingie…
And chrome won’t do it because of youtube, now that I think of it.
On Android, Chrome actually has two ways to disable it (either turn on Data Saver, or go into the site settings sub-page of the settings, and disable it in the Media section). Neither option completely prevents it from working, but it’s better than nothing.
On the desktop, you have to dig through chrome://flags though to find a setting that does essentially the same thing as the option Firefox has had buried in their about:config page for years now, with what appear to be similar limitations.
There was setting in about:config that’s been in Firefox for a while. It never was exposed in the preferences pane, though, and it became less and less effective as time went on because web developers started working to circumvent it.
Hopefully this new thing they’re doing is more resistant to being ignored by web pages, and actually always requires user interaction to enable video.
@post by Alfman 2019-02-05 8:17 pm
I didn’t even know old OSNews had comment search; google “site:osnews.com names_of_posters topics/words_used” always worked fine for me.
Apple did it with Safari years ago
Drumhellar,
I am aware of it, yeah it wasn’t 100% effective.
The author said it won’t stop video from autoplaying when audio is muted, which doesn’t make much sense to me, but given where mozilla makes it’s money it might make sense to them. I just wish they’d go further and give us a way to prevent the video elements from even loading anything at all until there’s an interaction (akin to the way flashblock worked).
Autoplaying video _without audio_ is at least somewhat tolerable to me… (and @Thom &
, OSNews sometimes had such ads… _muted_ 😛 )
zima,
Sure, it is more “tolerable” for videos to autoplay without audio, but autoplay on mute still seems like an anti-feature that nobody except for advertisers would be asking for.
In the past autoplay has been especially problematic in firefox with videos in multiple tabs playing concurrently. The proposed solution, as described, could end up muting the audio component but continue to waste resources playing muted videos in the background. The settings & extensions I use now are about 90% effective in fixing the autoplay issues, I hope these don’t break (again) after firefox updates. We’ll see what happens soon enough with the next update.