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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.
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.
>"The "bounce back" was for useless stuff that provides little to no value,"
Yeah, like Adblock, Ublock Origin, HTML5 block, Nuke Anything, NoScript. Give me a break. There are TONS of useful and valuable addons. The ones that suffered the most were the ones tweaking the UI (a few I do miss) and hopefully that will recover too, once additional API's are released.
>"Firefox is slower than Chrome only coming ahead in Kraken/WebXPRT."
When I look at many different benchmarks from different people, what *I* see is a mixture of wins and loses, and mostly very narrow margins. For NORMAL, REAL-WORLD browsing, most users will notice no speed difference between current Firefox and current Chrome. It is like worrying about a car that can go 0-60 in 6 seconds and one that goes 0-60 in 5.75 seconds.... really doesn't matter that much.
>"And that "privacy" you so love - is non-existent. They just backdoor it through "experiments" which are exempt from their privacy policy and supposedly have privacy polices of their own, but in reality it's whatever data they want to harvest, they can, and will - with no oversight."
As far as I am aware, all those "experiments" in Firefox have a simple "OFF" setting in the preferences and/or in about:config. And without nags, and without reverting back on after updates. Meanwhile, Chrome is a Google mystery binary that does anything it wants - with no oversight AND no ability to look at the code. Google does seem to care about security at least as much as Mozilla. But privacy? Mozilla has taken that lead many times.
What tit-for-tat? I'm talking about practical realities. The simple fact is that Firefox provides a better API for blockers than Chrome does, even after the change to WebExtensions. The author of NoScript thinks Firefox's add-on API is better than Chrome's as well.