Firefox 66 to block automatically playing audible video and audio (2019)

Interesting, I didn’t know that. I decided to standardize on “click to play”, and added some logic to try starting the audio engine again if it didn’t start the first time.

Some games have Ctrl as their crouch key.

It has always been user hostile since the days of pop-over ads, pop-under ads, obnoxious browser toolbars that were basically malware, etc. It seems like since around the year 2000 it’s been a nonstop fight between people who want to extract money and advertising impressions out of users versus people trying to keep the web user friendly. I think we only had maybe a 5 year run of the web being user-friendly at the beginning, and that was just because people hadn’t quite yet figured out how to extract money from web usage.

The whole "user interaction" permissions model should just be scrapped for an unmute button in the browser chrome.

There’s no way to have permissions that depend on things that happen inside the content box / “unsafe zone” that can’t be gamed.

My browser never plays audio which I do not explicitly request. That would be madness!

This is my preferred interface for NPR news, and it might address your issue also:

https://text.npr.org/

This is actually very easy to patch: https://github.com/openlab-aux/vuizvui/blob/61b943d89b08959e...

Essentially it's disabling gesture activation, so if you want to allow audio you need to do this explicitly. Note however, that whenever you directly visit a video file, audio will still play but this is very rarely the case.

Would you rather websites keep using animated GIFs instead? Because I think this is why GIFs are still in active use despite being a terrible format in terms of compression/bandwidth: browsers impose all of these limitations on video, which don't apply to GIFs because they're images.

That would result in all those videos getting replaced with gifs and wasting more resources.

There are extensions that do that.

Read the comment section on the article for some discussion on this. Firefox does allow users to opt-in to inaudible autoplay video blocking but it’s not the default.

The reasoning is that advertisers can approximate video with canvas tags, gifs, or just swapping out images really fast, defeating the point and needlessly burning more CPU/bandwidth. But for users that care you can still opt-in to this behavior and presumably few enough people do this that the workarounds aren’t widespread.

(The key difference seems to be that playing audio has a clear path that’s straightforward to block but “video” can be approximated by any webpage interactivity making it harder to lock down)

You almost can, other than the annoying animated image exception (I would really like media controls on those, you can currently only set them to play once, never, or infinitely). Privacy and Security -> under "Permissions" click settings next to autoplay -> select "Block Audio and Video" under "default for all websites".

For animated images I'm not sure if it is exposed in the UI but in about:config change image.animation_mode to "once". If you want to replay it after that, you will need to open the image in a new tab. It is somewhat easy to miss them with this setting since even images at the bottom of the page will start their single animation when you hit pagedown (even if you move the page view up again almost immediately).

Mostly this autoplay blocking has been wonderful, a massive improvement. The one slight annoyance I've noticed is that the exceptions managament isn't as flexible as uBlock origin's configuration and you can't tell Firefox to unblock all of Bandcamp. I'm not sure if this is something that could potentially be done in an addon. The other thing I'd really like is a way to default "loop" to off on media controls so that I can just play the media once by default when I do play it. Oh yeah, for some reason I can't imagine Twitter tries hard to make videos repeat and current autoplay restrictions aren't able to stop that (I don't have an account so I suspect this is a "fuck you for not making an account" thing. I can't imagine anyone putting up with that more than briefly).

Thanks for recommending that. It’s fascinating seeing the diversity of opinions amongst commenters. Also Firefox’s reasoning behind not blocking inaudible video was fascinating. Basically, if inaudible autoplay video is blocked advertisers work around it using canvas tags which is worse for everyone.

it's the best mobile browser now, since it supports uBlock Origin.

I hate the way the auto blocking is implemented.

There is no API to detect that auto blocking is enabled and manual intervention is needed.

You are forced to play a fake audio tag with sound and detect that it's event does not fire. This is impossible, so you do it with a timeout and throw your hands up.

i was with up until the last paragraph. i like to make fun of javascript as much as the next person (unless you're a dyed in the wool only programs in JS type person, then i make fun of you too ;-) however, the web definitely has benefited from local interactive programming. it just so happens that JS was the language of the web browser. thinking that the internet would be nearly as interesting without some sort of local interactive programming in the browser just screams trolling or someone that really doesn't remember the early days of the web in its full glory.

A video you can hear (in other words, this blocks websites from automatically making noise).