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Firefox To Block Auto-Playing Audio Starting March 2019 (zdnet.com)

Posted by msmash on from the up-next dept.

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.

12 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. Video by jwhyche · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
    1. Re:Video by Crashmarik · · Score: 2

      There's actually a setting to block that in the current release of Firefox

      https://support.mozilla.org/en...

      It just stopped working properly a few releases ago.

    2. Re:Video by markdavis · · Score: 4, Informative

      >" What about video? That is just as bad, if not worse."

      You can already do this in Firefox (blocking autoplay of ALL regular video, regardless of muted or not). And you can do it in many versions, including the current. But it requires a setting in about:config (Firefox is the only browser I know of so far that allows blocking autoplay of muted video, and no addon/plugin is needed):

      media.autoplay.default=1
      media.autoplay.enabled.user-gestures-needed=false
      media.autoplay.allow-muted=false

      Although it will break some sites (I find in practice it is a rare thing, though). The Firefox UI currently includes no way to set the first two of the above, you must use about:config.

      Yes, there are some nasty ways around this that some bad sites could still use. To improve further, make sure to block the playing of animated GIF/PNG/WEBP, too (note there is no per-use control for this, unfortunately):

      image.animation_mode;once (if you want to play it once only, no looping) or
      image.animation_mode;none (never play it at all)

    3. Re:Video by Potor · · Score: 2

      No, AC is correct; those work. I set a few other things though as well:

      media.autoplay.ask-permission: true

      media.autoplay.block-webaudio: true

      media.autoplay.enabled.user-gestures-needed: true

  2. For The Love of God, Video Next! by RonVNX · · Score: 3

    Autoplay *anything* has to be stopped.

    1. Re:For The Love of God, Video Next! by grumpy-cowboy · · Score: 2

      "especially full-page background videos, or smoke/effects as a top layer.". So I can send you my internet bill (bandwidth)? Yes we need an easy way to disable ALL audio/video if we want because it's MY bandwidth. MY computer. I will decide what I want to see and listen to. Not you. You need an example? Here is a site I don't have choice to use (my client use it for timesheets) : https://manitousolution.com/en... Why on earth they have to use a stupid video in the background?! They waste my bandwidth, useless distraction and add nothing to the goal of the site.

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      Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
  3. Blocking silent video is a hard problem by tepples · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Big deal by tepples · · Score: 2

    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.

  5. Re:FFS, people, do a little searchin'... by TypoNAM · · Score: 2

    Except those settings haven't worked since 63v because they decided to complicate autoplay configuration even further: https://support.mozilla.org/en...

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  6. Re:Would you subscribe to block ads? by markdavis · · Score: 3, Insightful

    >"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. Autoplay is usually a hostile assault on the user.

  7. Re:Would you subscribe to block ads? by grumpy-cowboy · · Score: 2

    Video ads is the way ensuring that I'll never visit the site again.

    --
    Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
  8. Firefox blocked my audio several years ago by mea2214 · · Score: 2

    ... when they stopped support for ALSA. It's kind of a feature actually. I fire up Chrome if I need to hear something.