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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

There's no whitelist. I've been using this in Nightly for a while and the ability to block youtube videos from autoplaying is great.

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Youtube is the one (and pretty much only) site where I generally do want the videos to autoplay.

You only have to set it once. It's a per-domain setting (not sure if the screenshot in the article explains this very well). The default, in Nightly at least, is to ask the first time a site tries to autoplay video. It looks just like the popup that asks when a site wants your location.

While this is a good step, it will unfortunately lead to an increase in first leevl support by people who are confused by the new dialog, or who misclicked and cant figure it out.

But what would the solution be?

A) mozilla keeps a list of domains who can autoplay on their own domain. I am not a fan of this as mozilla would now need to vet sites, and could heavily influence all sorts of metrics on affected sited

B) websites can identify themselv as mediaSite or similar, where the primary focus is the video. However this would allow any site to use that tag, and solve nothing

Chrome has a solution to this that doesn't involve individually vetting sites. It's based on an individual user's behavior on previous visits to the site, and what percentage of those visits involved media usage.

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p...

There's some sort of whitelist:

"We are also allowing sites to autoplay audibly if the user has previously granted them camera/microphone permission, so that sites which have explicit user permission to run WebRTC should continue to work as they do today."

throwaway2048 was asking about a built-in, default whitelist. The user can change this setting per-domain to make their own whitelist.

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