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Firefox To Block Auto-Playing Audio Starting March 2019 (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Starting with Firefox 66 -- scheduled for release on March 19, 2019 -- Mozilla plans to block auto-playing audio on both desktop and mobile -- a feature it began to test on Nightly builds last year. The new rule will apply to any website that plays audio without user interaction in advance -- such as a user clicking a button. The audio autoplay ban will apply to both HTML5 audio and video elements used for media playback in modern browsers, meaning Firefox will block sound coming from both ads and video players, the most common sources of such abuse. Mozilla's move comes almost a year after Chrome took a similar decision to block all auto-playing sound by default with the release of Chrome 66 in April 2018. Microsoft similarly announced plans to block auto-playing sounds in Edge, but the feature never made it to production.
What about video? That is just as bad, if not worse. An how about blocking the ability for a video to self extract its ass from a frame and chase my ass down the page.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
You mean we aren't going to be able to hear the "Your computer has many virus on it. Call Windows Support immediately at 800-555-1212 or we will be forced to deactivate your Microsoft"? What a shame!
Autoplay *anything* has to be stopped.
I have autoplay for video and audio turned off in Firefox, and ever since they went to "quantum", this stuff actually works.
1. In your address bar, put about:config.
2. In about:config search, autoplay
3. media.autoplay.default;1
4. media.autoplay.enabled;false
Enjoy your lack of autoplay, even in obnoxious sites like cnn and youtube. No extensions needed.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Audio on PC's have always been problematic. At least on my old Amstrad 1512 it had a volume on the PC Speaker. But in general now with multi-tasking apps. I wish I could really control how audio works on them. Mute this App, Allow App to play if focused, Allow App to play on background.
Almost how nVidia does this on Windows you can tell which app to use the more advanced card. Allow for performance Apps to run fast, and others to run slower, because that was good enough.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Blocking automatic playback of audio will block automatic playback of video with audio. Blocking automatic playback of silent video is a much harder problem. Just blocking MP4, WebM, and GIF animations is not enough, as a site can provide fallbacks that use script or even pure CSS. Some Slashdot users claim to have used extensions to block video, but none of them seem to block all methods in my test suite.
Disabling autoplay has been in about:config for years now
Setting media.autoplay.default to 1 and media.autoplay.allow-muted to false in Firefox 65.0 did not block pure CSS motion JPEG or pure CSS motion PNG.
and you kiss your mom with that mouth?
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
Give the web page back to the user and the browser.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Video ads are the only way that a lot of sites can keep from going behind a paywall.
Video ads are the only way that a lot of sites can keep from going behind a paywall.
As long as the user can choose to play them or not.
Consider a website that displays the headline and the first sentence, and the rest of the article loads once the user has made a gesture to activate a button labeled "Play Videos and Continue Reading". Would you accept a flow like that?
Hate is such a strong word, yet needs a helping adverb, such as "FN hate."
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
... when they stopped support for ALSA. It's kind of a feature actually. I fire up Chrome if I need to hear something.
All of my computer speakers have a volume control on the front of the right speaker, and my wireless keyboard has a volume and mute button. Most laptops also have a function key combination to raise/lower the volume and mute functions.
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But you can not control which App is playing and when. The Volume control on the Amstrad was fine, because it was an DOS based 8086 CPU with 512k of RAM, it will only run one app at once.
However we now have many apps running at once, and they call could be making noises. So the volume control is less useful. Because some noises we want to keep and others we want to toss.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Pretty sure the built-in audio mixer in Win10 lets you control volume per app.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
I discovered this recently because I started using FF only for playing Twitch video (to keep it out of my regular browser for various reasons). I found out that the display screen idle time-out will cause even the currently active tab, with FF as the front window, to not be considered active, and when the stream I was waiting for starts, it does not play. I can see how this is perfectly sensible as a default, but fortunately there is an override for those times when it is not desirable behavior, or when the detection has undesirable false positives.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
This enhancement is appreciated.