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Firefox Blocks Autoplaying Web Audio (engadget.com)
Mozilla's latest Nightly builds for Firefox now include an option to mute autoplaying audio. The feature was recently added to the Chrome browser, but Mozilla's update offers a few more options. According to Engadget, "You can turn the feature off entirely, force it to ask for permission, and make exceptions for specific sites." Keep in mind that these are nightly releases, so you will most likely run into some bugs. The "polished version" is likely weeks away.
Nothing should autoplay, ever, unless I whitelist it. No exceptions.
I hate fat people.
The fact that it's taken until 2018 for this to happen is a joke. Luckily, NoScript has existed for about as long as this has been a problem
No one cares because FireFox is dead.
They killed the addon ecosystem for "major speed improvements" that could only top Chrome in 2 benchmarks.
Such a waste of potential.
Muting audio is not enough. It shouldn't play video AT ALL. Video and animation, audible or not, is still extremely irritating, distracting, and consumes copious amount of bandwidth and CPU, and thus power and battery. And all that slows further rendering and makes using slower/older machines that much more painful. And on multiuser systems, it affects other people and processes, too (yes, I know that is rare nowadays, but I deal with it all the time on big systems, and remote viewing and remote X sessions).
If you want something MUCH better and RIGHT NOW, see this addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...
It hasn't been updated recently, and has some flaws, but it beats the hell out of anything else I can come up with right now. Works well most of the time.
I really wish we could stop all the annoying animation and scrolling/fading/creeping crap on sites, too. And no, disabling javascript is no longer an option.
Browsers allow a muted VP8, VP9, or AVC file to autoplay because allowing it takes less Internet bandwidth than falling back to animated GIF, a sequence of discrete JPEG files, or a JPEG filmstrip animated with CSS sprites.
If you plan to build an extension to block all autoplay, here are some test cases. Good luck getting them all.
What's the easiest way to block the auto pop-out of videos when you scroll down? Whoever came up with that needs to be drug out back...
"Hey, I want this annoying video at the top of the page to follow me when I scroll past it and block the text I came here to read." - said no one ever.
I just tried your suggestion in Firefox ESR 52 on Debian 9, with media.autoplay.enabled changed to false. Though the preference successfully blocked VP8, VP9, and AVC video from autoplaying, several methods of presenting video managed to sneak past it: GIF, JPEG sequence, PNG sequence, JPEG filmstrip, and PNG filmstrip.
I use a lot of strange addons, and nearly every one was available immediately or just a few months after the switchover.
That's a big "nearly". There's no counterpart to Keybinder for Firefox 57 and later, and there won't be until bug 1325692 is fixed.
Tabs suck.
Classic Theme Restorer add-on used to provide ability to block them.
When will Firefox restore this functionality?
Open about:config and add the new hidden pref media.autoplay.allow-muted and set it to false to return to the old behavior and keep your sanity.
My internet surfing needs have been met by generally out-of-date hardware for 20 years. (I'm poor). Which gives me a window in something: websites that are a heavy load and use up computer resources. The ones than take minutes, or crash or freeze up, that use up ram.
I used to think, "If I could only tell these web designers that their site is causing lots of computers out there to slow to a crawl..."
Then one day, it hit me. Some web designers purposely design sites to use up computing resources. The last thing they want is to be just one of 20 tabs. If you aren't paying attention to their site, they make it impossible to go anyplace on the net.
Tell me I'm paranoid.
A lot of people say "why haven't browsers just turned off autoplay" as if "autoplay" is a browser feature you can just turn off without affecting anything else. Unfortunately, it is not.
As a matter of fact there is an HTML5 "autoplay" feature, but it's hardly ever used. The "autoplaying" audio and video you experience is mostly scripts loading a video and calling "play()". Unfortunately, in the browser, there's no straightforward way to distinguish that from legitimate uses, e.g. a game playing a sound triggered by some event. It's even more difficult for non-audio cases, because Web developers can *and do* create "autoplaying" videos even without using script, e.g. using animated GIFs or sequences of PNG images selected by CSS. Those are much worse for users in every way than letting the site play video in a proper format.
So, browsers mostly aren't trying to block autoplaying silent video, and have to come up with heuristics to block autoplaying audio. There are tradeoffs because false positives are bad; e.g. making it hard for games to play sounds is a problem. It's easy for autoplay detection heuristics to break legitimate Web sites and cause users --- maybe not you, but other users --- to get upset, and Web developers too.
In short, this is a very hard problem, there are no perfect solutions, and the solutions being deployed now are the result of a lot of work over quite a long period of time.
The "JPEG filmstrip" and "PNG filmstrip" methods are based on "CSS Sprite Sheet Animations with steps()" by Guil Hernandez.
Unfortunately, in the browser, there's no straightforward way to distinguish that from legitimate uses, e.g. a game playing a sound triggered by some event.
Staunch anti-JavaScript advocates would point out that if a game wants to play a sound, the developer of the game can distribute the game as a separate executable that the user can choose to download to his or her computer and launch there. Some would go as far as to encourage the developer to distribute the game in source code form that the user can inspect and compile.
I mean, why is it the case that browsers do not come with a setting to allow users to specify whether or not they want to enable autoplay? Are there any technical reasons why this might a difficult feature to implement?
Call me Mr Underwhelmed. Let me know when the arrogant wankers put back the option for Tabs on Bottom...
Mozilla again follows in the footsteps of google chrome. It's to bad when users ask for features, they are just ignored. When their entire userbase is gone, they want to listen. Just die already.
The ones who came up with all those autoplay fuckery ads should all get a week of scaphism for their efforts.
At what point do you expect it to render or not, because every resource linked by the website itself can and will cause a render?
Assume that a viewer is seeking to avoid animation as an accommodation for a sensory processing issue. For such a viewer, three paints should be enough, one after the document reaches each of these states:
1. Above the fold ready CSS specified in the <head> has downloaded, and enough HTML has downloaded to make the document at least one viewport-height tall. 2. Ready The HTML and any CSS specified in the <head> have downloaded. Corresponds roughly to the later of the "load" event on <head> and the "DOMContentLoaded" event on <body>. 3. Load All resources have downloaded. Corresponds to the "load" event on <body>On a sufficiently fast connection, time from ATF to Ready is usually short enough that even the ATF paint can be skipped.
As someone who's been using this feature in Safari since AFAIR last year, I can tell autoplay blocking makes browsing A LOT less annoying. Nice to see Firefox catching up.
I'm amazed at the amateurism with with browser companies pick up this sort of stuff.
Today it is sounds (but not fonts). /not/ fully capture all, and make the default wrong. And they did so after this issie had been reported what, /decades/ earlier?
Yesterday it was videos (but not sounds).
Somewhere along the line it was pages hijacking browser shortcuts. And browser companies even going so far as to
Maximising the browser window, in the past. Pop-ups. The list goes on and on.
Everything gets fucking approached one by one, without a streamlined architecture or thinking behind it. Let alone interface.
Failure much.
I've had a button on my mouse mapped to "mute" for many years now, and I think it's the single beat customization that can be done. If you just opened a link, odds are your hand is on the mouse, as soon as you hear anything it's muted in a tiny fraction of a second. It works particularly well to avoid hearing Youtube ads.
Unfortunatley I haven't found anything as fast for mobile yet.
... and your auto play