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Comment by laythea | Hacker News Reader

Yes but I have found that if you "open in new tab" then it loads the page even though it is in the background. It should do as it does as startup but doesn't.

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This, exactly. I'd love to open half a dozen tabs pointing at videos, without having to wait for each one to load and then quickly pause it.

(Related: I'd also really like to middle-click video annotations to open them in a tab. No, I don't want to replace the current video with them.)

Some sites, such as YouTube, don't start playing a video until you switch to the tab.

That hasn't been my experience with YouTube; middle-clicking to open a half-dozen videos in tabs starts all the videos playing at once.

Not sure if you're using Chrome or Firefox. I just tested FF 54 by alt-clicking a link. It loads and autoplays the non-active tab. Chrome v59, loads the page but doesn't autoplay until you switch to it. Chrome is my daily driver and I really prefer this behavior.

But recent performance improvements, especially the handling of many, many tabs has me looking at FF again.

By default they do start playing immediately in Firefox. Configurable with the media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground setting.

Sorry but you got the wrong setting here. To disable autoplay it's media.autoplay.enabled

media.autoplay.enabled toggles whether videos in the current (foreground) tab starts auto playing or not

The question was about videos in a background tab, which is controlled by the media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground setting.

Unfortunately, neither of those settings does quite what I'd like. Once a tab has been in the foreground, I'd like it to continue being able to play things in the background, including new things. (For instance, some sites play a chime for notifications.) I just don't want anything played from a tab that has never been in the foreground.

Sadly mozilla provides no documentation for those settings, but I can assure you that this setting does not care if the tab is in the foreground or background, autoplay is simply disabled which it seems to me was what was asked here IIANM.

Some sites maybe, but definitely not youtube.

With firefox go to about:config and disable media.autoplay.enabled now you have to click play for the video to start.

Yeah, my workaround in a situation like that is to open all. Then close, restart and click restore session. It only loads the active page, not all.

That's probably the right behavior for those people who are never going to open the tab; but for people like me who have few tabs, open in new tab is a great way to load something I'm actually going to read soon; eg open the article in a new tab, scan the HN comments while the article loads (especially if it's from one of those sites that takes 3 minutes to load)

I think this behavior should be linked with the "Make new tabs have the current focus when opened" option. So if that is not set, and the new tab does not appear, then Firefox should not load. In the devs defense, the inconsistent behaviour between startup and "restore all", and "open in new tab without focus" is easy to miss.

EDIT: I would agree with you in your assessment of the default behavior however, if it were the case, that most people only have a few tabs open normally.

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