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Just FYI, audio autoplay is being actively worked on in the current Firefox development version, precisely to solve the problem you describe. There are some is

Just FYI, audio autoplay is being actively worked on in the current Firefox development version, precisely to solve the problem you describe. There are some issues with coming up with a UX that doesn't privilege a small set of sites out of the box over everyone else [1] and also doesn't prompt the user on every single site that tries to play video (the current Firefox Nightly behavior; it's rather annoying). So for this specific case, the reason it hasn't happened yet is not some nefarious conflict of interest but actual hard problems that need to be solved (and are being solved), coupled with resource constraints. As far as containers go, I agree they are great if you understand the model. I use them. Most users find them terribly confusing in their current form. Again, a UX issue. That said, the idea of having things in a private container by default is somewhat interesting. The hard part in some way would be the discoverability of the whitelisting flow and user confusion about why their customization information is not being remembered like in every other browser. I'll try to shop this around to people a bit and see if they can figure out a way to make this work sanely. Disclaimer: I work on Firefox, but not in UX. [1] Google's solution in Chrome; it suppresses new startups by making the experience suck there, which is good for incumbents like YouTube but maybe less good for the web as a whole in the long term.

jillesvangurp 8y ago
I have an extension that blocks audio per site already (mute sites by default). Awesome stuff, but blocks only the sound. It shows a little mute icon on the tab if it mutes. I simply unmute when I actually want sound and the setting seems sticky. I was talking about video auto playing (with the sound off) by default. I don't want that ever, unless I allowed it before. I want to block html5 content from activating at all unless specifically allowed. I'm on the beta channel. As far as I know there are no plans to address this and extensions that have tried to implement this are running into some limitations that make this hard apparently. Hence a lot of variations of flashblock extensions that simply set the about:config setting instead of having per site policies with whitelists and blacklists. Private browser containers would be nice to have even if they are not yet default out of the box. I'd simply make this an option on all containers (including the default one and default it to off). I agree the ux for this would need a bit work to be discoverable/intuitive.
- bzbarsky 8y ago
  Ah, I had misunderstood the issue; thank you for clarifying. It looks like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1405827 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1405827 tracks WebExternsion API that would make it easy to create extensions that address this use case.

jillesvangurp 8y ago

I have an extension that blocks audio per site already (mute sites by default). Awesome stuff, but blocks only the sound. It shows a little mute icon on the tab if it mutes. I simply unmute when I actually want sound and the setting seems sticky. I was talking about video auto playing (with the sound off) by default. I don't want that ever, unless I allowed it before. I want to block html5 content from activating at all unless specifically allowed. I'm on the beta channel. As far as I know there are no plans to address this and extensions that have tried to implement this are running into some limitations that make this hard apparently. Hence a lot of variations of flashblock extensions that simply set the about:config setting instead of having per site policies with whitelists and blacklists. Private browser containers would be nice to have even if they are not yet default out of the box. I'd simply make this an option on all containers (including the default one and default it to off). I agree the ux for this would need a bit work to be discoverable/intuitive.

bzbarsky 8y ago
Ah, I had misunderstood the issue; thank you for clarifying. It looks like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1405827 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1405827 tracks WebExternsion API that would make it easy to create extensions that address this use case.