Firefox 66 Will Silence AutoPlay Audio and Video

[Guest]

Mozilla plans to stop websites from distracting you with automatically playing audio or videos in an upcoming version of its Firefox browser.

Firefox 66 Will Silence AutoPlay Audio and Video : Read more

 

[TheScrubofNick]

When do we get to block the "fly-over snidely prompting us to sign up for a newsletter?"

 

[salgado18]

Speaking of which, could you guys forward to the web designers that the bottom banner doesn't play well with zoom or something like that? Sometimes that banner is so big, the close button disappears, and I have to inspect > display:none just to use the site.

 

[chalabam]

The video shouldn't be played at all if the user doesn't manually plays it.

 

[chalabam]

Speaking of which, could you guys forward to the web designers that the bottom banner doesn't play well with zoom or something like that? Sometimes that banner is so big, the close button disappears, and I have to inspect > display:none just to use the site.

Web designers don't understand that everybody has his own zoom preferences, because everybody has a different size monitor, at different distances, at different resolutions, and a page with text to read is better at one resolution meanwhile YouTube is better at other resolution.

The first thing I do when I enter a new webpage is to click <control>+<mouse wheel> to make the text readable, and then I need to manually "Inspect" and delete all the stuff that gets over the text, or static stuff that takes half of the screen.

 

[randomizer]

The video shouldn't be played at all if the user doesn't manually plays it.

There is a preference for that. Set media.autoplay.default=1 in about:config. It is not exposed in the UI because it's probably not considered ready yet.

 

[tirdfurguson]

I appreciate the irony of the video that is autoplaying directly in the middle of this article

 

[magnus909]

Videos shouldn't autoplay at all.
Period.
Muting them (but still having them play) is the absolute worst thing you can do.

On a metered connection where you pay for every d-mn byte streamed you may not notice the streaming going on in a Video that isn't visible to you and since it is muted it can continue to consume your precious bandwidth, making it seem like you should pay for higher data plans, when in practice they have gulped that data in the background.
It seems almost like a conspiracy that none of the big three web browsers supports turning off autoplay of videos anymore.
They did do it in the past, so that makes me wonder if ISP:s, ad-networks etc has put a pressure on them not to have this feature available anymore.

 

[bigdragon]

I also can't stand autoplay videos on any site. Firefox used to block all autoplay all the time. Sad to see them going in the same direction Google is.

 

[ravewulf]

The only place for autoplaying videos (with audio) is on landing pages dedicated to that purpose. Like a YouTube or Vimeo page for a specific video. Even then they shouldn't play if they're in a background tab until that tab is selected. Looping videos that have no audio track should definitely be an exception as they are often used as gif replacements or as moving page backgrounds.

 

[littleleo]

Hope it works here

 

[JamesSneed]

The video shouldn't be played at all if the user doesn't manually plays it.

There is a preference for that. Set media.autoplay.default=1 in about:config. It is not exposed in the UI because it's probably not considered ready yet.

Except it doesn't really do anything anymore. Same as the autoplay-policy in chrome doesn't do anything now either.

 

[BulkZerker]

loads page in Brave I don t see a problem.

 

[wiyosaya]

It seems almost like a conspiracy that none of the big three web browsers supports turning off autoplay of videos anymore.

For Firefox:

about:config

find both of:

media.autoplay.enabled
media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground

Set the first one to false, and the second true.

Problem solved.

 

[Niva]

Some of us, those who have been browsing Tom's Hardware since bore the turn of the century, remember when there were no ads on this site, no auto-playing videos. As I type this, there are 3 videos automatically playing on this very website. I don't know if there's audio, because I have the whole system on mute when I browse THG these days.

Sadly, the whole internet is like this. Maybe it's time to just unplug and go into the mountains.

 

[littleleo]

Skype is no longer supported on Firefox, is that Microsoft's doing or Mozilla?

 

[Kridian]

Get the FireFox extension: Disable HTML5 Autoplay

 

[InvalidError]

So many websites are terminally overrun with obnoxious ads that I just can't bear visiting them without adblock and noscript to wrangle bloat such as videos or animated banners floating over an article I am trying to read.

Some sites are resorting to blocking people who block ads and scripts, though a few of those I visit quit doing that after a while. Guessing their traffic dropped so much from people just not visiting them anymore that they concluded blocking blockers wasn't worth it in the end, it only drives people to other similar sites that aren't ad/script-walled.

 

[runbei]

As of 4/12/19 it doesn't work where it matters to me - on YouTube, for example, where the home page runs an autoplay video with NO CONTROLS to stop it.