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.

Comments

Good

[KixWooder]

Nothing should autoplay, ever, unless I whitelist it. No exceptions.

Re:Good

[sexconker]

Can we go back to the days where images and fonts weren't automatically downloaded? What about asking to accept every time a cookie is requested?

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

You are trying to make an equivalency argument where there is none.

A cookie, or image or font is not really in your face. It does not really fire a giant sequence of events from the visual lobes at the back of our brain using our resources (10% of our bodies energy) to operate.

There is a reason we get so much more upset over rich media advertisements trying to get our attention, our annoyance is biologically based, we are attempting to conserve energy for our function and survival. Advertisers love to make arguments about how all of these things are equivalent and the same, however audible devices are utilized for crowd control against people all the time. Audible devices were utilized in many cases as a means of driving people who were dug in out of compounds after long standoffs as well.

So please put down your straw man and politely back away from the conversation before we realize that your a media shill and we decide to eat your face off.

No autoplay, period.

[markdavis]

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.

Re:No autoplay, period.

[tepples]

And no, disabling javascript is no longer an option.

If you don't disable JavaScript, sites will use a setInterval to load each frame of the video as a JPEG and display it, as in this demo.

Re:Good luck blocking all autoplay

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want it to fall back to anything. I want it to put a big blank rectangle, with a standardized play button in the center, that does not begin downloading anything until I click on the play button. Webpages do not need to be the multi-megabyte javascript monstrosities that they currently are.

Autoplay is not a feature you can just disable

[roca]

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.

Re:...yet..

[Trogre]

I think you'll find the decline started well before that, back when they ousted THE GUY WHO INVENTED JAVASCRIPT over some stupid SJW non-issue.