Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
>"No one cares because FireFox is dead. They killed the addon ecosystem for "major speed improvements" that could only top Chrome in 2 benchmarks."
Don't feel the troll.....
The ecosystem they "killed" actually bounced back quite quickly. I use a lot of strange addons, and nearly every one was available immediately or just a few months after the switchover.
And Firefox is, by most measurements, just as fast, overall, as Chrome is NOW. And yet is more driven by the community, cares about privacy more, and is not a closed binary. Plus, I trust Mozilla a lot more than Google, who has their hands in everyone's business.
I am far more annoyed by the "Chromification" of Firefox, but that is not new, and is still far less Chromey than Chrome.
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 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.
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.
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.
Fortunately, the manual sequence "pseudo-video" stuff you listed isn't used much out there.
Yet. Once Flash blocking became commonplace, advertisers switched to autoplaying HTML5 video. Once it becomes common to block HTML5 video, advertisers are likely to embrace these fallback methods.
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.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The "bounce back" was for useless stuff that provides little to no value, much like Chrome's addons. No SQLite manager, no FTP, no SSH, no TableTools, no "advanced" right click, etc. It was just the gimmicky garbage that was left behind in the aftermath because addon developers no longer have the access they need to create useful tools. WebExtensions are woefully inadequate compared to XUL.
Firefox is slower than Chrome https://venturebeat.com/2018/0... only coming ahead in Kraken/WebXPRT.
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.
>"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.