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Firefox 66 to block automatically playing audible video and audio
- richardwhiuk 8y ago> At this time, we’re also working on blocking autoplay for Web Audio content, but have not yet finalized our implementation. We expect to ship with autoplay Web Audio content blocking enabled by default sometime in 2019. We’ll let you know! So you can auto-play a video, muted, and auto-play audio separately? Well that seems like a trivial work-around.
- Vinnl 8y agoI don't know why anyone would do that if you already know that that's going to be blocked in a short while as well.
- thiago_fm 8y agoAbout time
- grezql 8y agoyes, and hope they can block those annoying videos that minimizes and follows you scrolling down to read and article. Nothing is more annoying than seeing moving objects/video when reading an article. Cant concentrate at all
- noneeeed 8y agoMy HCI lecturer at uni used to call that our "monkey reflex". We have some really primitive reflexes around detecting movement in our peripheral vision that happen waaay before our conscious brain gets involved. I think some of them happen within the first few layers of visual processing. You basically can't ever fully ignore movement, especially if it is irregular (so not a short loop), a part of your brain is always shouting about it, although your brain will tune out highly regular motion like a swinging pendulum.
- throwaway2048 8y agoDosen't seem to be any mention of a whitelist feature for important properties like what chrome has for youtube.com et all. glad to see it
- sp332 8y agoThere's no whitelist. I've been using this in Nightly for a while and the ability to block youtube videos from autoplaying is great.
- mindcrime 8y agoYoutube is the one (and pretty much only) site where I generally do want the videos to autoplay.
- sp332 8y agoYou only have to set it once. It's a per-domain setting (not sure if the screenshot in the article explains this very well). The default, in Nightly at least, is to ask the first time a site tries to autoplay video. It looks just like the popup that asks when a site wants your location.
- thecatspaw 8y agoWhile this is a good step, it will unfortunately lead to an increase in first leevl support by people who are confused by the new dialog, or who misclicked and cant figure it out. But what would the solution be? A) mozilla keeps a list of domains who can autoplay on their own domain. I am not a fan of this as mozilla would now need to vet sites, and could heavily influence all sorts of metrics on affected sited B) websites can identify themselv as mediaSite or similar, where the primary focus is the video. However this would allow any site to use that tag, and solve nothing
- calebegg 8y agoChrome has a solution to this that doesn't involve individually vetting sites. It's based on an individual user's behavior on previous visits to the site, and what percentage of those visits involved media usage. https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-policy-changes https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p...
- paol 8y agoYou can use it right now, it's just disabled by default. Go to about:config and set media.autoplay.default to 1 or 2.
- cptskippy 8y agoWhat do the values mean?
- saagarjha 8y agoSomeone has listed them here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1238033 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1238033
- cptskippy 8y agoThanks! media.autoplay.default: 0 : Allow autoplay 1 : Block all sites 2 : Ask permission on Site by Site basis
- takeda 8y agoJust searched and looks like 2 controls on site-by-site basis https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1238033 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1238033
- dtech 8y agoVery good for those annoying news sites. The UI for allowing legitimate sites seems a bit hidden, I wonder if you'll get a request a la notifications.
- jonahhorowitz 8y agoMuted autoplay is still allowed. WTH Mozilla. Just stop. Stop the stupid auto-playing video. Nobody wants it. This announcement almost made my morning. It's frustrating seeing video everywhere when you're just trying to read an article. If I wanted video, I'd turn on my TV.
- helb 8y agoYou can disallow it in about:config: media.autoplay.allow-muted false …and even disable GIF animations: image.animation_mode normal …but if these became the default, people would come with arcane ways to bypass it.
- LinuxBender 8y agoOn a side note, I set image.animation_mode to "once" which keeps Slack memory and CPU usage down, as the animated emojis only get one pass at my CPU.
- jancsika 8y agoWhy once? Why not none?
- LinuxBender 8y agoSo I can view tihngs like noaa once. [1] I need to walk my out-of-shape self around the parking lot and that will tell me how long I have to not get wet. [1] - https://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/west/weus/vis-animated.gif https://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/west/weus/vis-animated.gif
- jancsika 8y agoOh man. Seems like the side-effect would be that you have to refresh the site to let your eyes have another pass through the animation. Either that or it's forced you to develop a razor sharp visual memory of short weather animations. :)
- drewg123 8y agoThe article shows that user will be able to whitelist sites on the desktop, but what about mobile? My use case is that I use FF on Android as my default web browser. If I turn off media autoplay, I'm 99% happy. However, there are a few sites that I want to autoplay. In fact, my local NPR stream refuses to play if not played via autoplay. So I'm forever toggling the autoplay setting on and off mainly so I can listen to my local NPR station.
- psychometry 8y agoThat's something you should report to NPR.
- tomp 8y agoNo, that very likely means that Firefox's implementation is broken. The website shouldn't be able to detect the difference between video loading really slowly and/or network being temporarily unavailable and video blocked.
- untog 8y agoMobile devices have user interaction restrictions for media playback. It sounds (though I have no idea myself) that NPR is getting tripped up by them somewhere.
- drewg123 8y agoYeah, I did. Its still not fixed when I last checked. And yes, I donate at a level high enough to have the email address of a real person at the station.. FWIW, this is an audio stream (their live stream).
- scegit 8y agoGreat job! very annoying. I was wondering why they haven't done this before.
- ericras 8y agoAn unintended consequence of this: sites will use massive animated GIFs instead. Edit: yeah, i should have actually read the headline and article.... whoops
- argd678 8y agoIt would be nice if this was an option and I could block muted auto play too. Some websites have so much media that the page takes 5 or more seconds to render when I just want to read the text.
- trumped 8y agobeen waiting for this since v1.0 ... on the other hand, popup windows appears to have made a come back... my dad clicked a "cat video" link on Facebook (external link) and it was pretty scary (had to end task or click download)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kgwxd 8y ago"Muted autoplay is still allowed." Hopefully that will remain configurable, that behavior is still visually annoying and a waste of bandwidth and energy. I've been disabling autoplay in Firefox via about:config since it was available, no audio or video unless I click play. I've never run into a scenario where I've wanted or needed it to be any other way.
- sp332 8y agoIn Nightly at least, media.autoplay.allow-muted = false should disable muted videos as well. I'm not positive they're moving this feature into FF66 for release but it seems likely.
- throw7 8y agoi've had autoplay disabled for awhile now... the latest annoyance is the floating videos used especially on news sites.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoMuted autoplay not being able to turn off -- is that for users, or for Google (who pay most of Mozilla's bills).
- bleriot 8y agoFor users. See all of the responses about gifs and bandwidth. I hate autoplay video but don’t want to sacrifice gifs to block it.
- JohnFen 8y agoWhy would you be sacrificing animated gifs? At worst, it just means you'd have to click something to get them to start animating (which, personally, I would consider a very good thing).
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tyingq 8y agoNow if I could only get NetFlix to stop it as well. Is there anyone that actually likes the autoplay when watching Netflix on TV? Update/Note: This is in the Roku app. I'm specifically talking about previews autoplaying while I scroll though different shows on the main navigation...
- grawprog 8y agoI don't mind when it autoplays the next episode of something i'm watching. Though i find it stops the autoplay and asks me if i'm still watching at probably the worst times. I can't stand though when it autoplays trailers or previews or automatically starts something new when i've finished something i'm watching. Scrolling through netflix and having things autoplay as I scroll through is annoying as all fuck.
- jerf 8y agoI find I'm being subconsciously trained to keep moving through the listings before the autoplay triggers. In addition to my distaste for them, they also seem to freeze up the app for a moment while they start; it's less than a second, but it's noticeable. I assume it's driving engagement with people in general, but it inhibits my engagement. Which goes back to one of my perennial frustrations with all this tracking and A/B testing bullshit; they're tracking my every mouse movement, they're slicing and dicing pennies in an effort to advertise at me, but when it comes to something I'd actually like, like them noticing that not only do I not "want" these autoplaying ads but that they actually decreased the very metrics they care about for me, suddenly our monstrous tracking machine with seemingly endless resources to stare at me like Sauron's All-Seeing Eye goes all blind on me.
- grawprog 8y ago> they also seem to freeze up the app for a moment while they start; it's less than a second, but it's noticeable. It's extremely noticable in the roku app. It pauses for a couple seconds every time you navigate so you can't really do anything until the autoplay loads. You end up seeing a few seconds of it for every single item you hover over.
- femto113 8y agoI've always found it curious that this sort of tech is called "blocking", as if the browser has to proactively prevent websites from reaching into your computer and playing a video or displaying an ad or popping up a window.
- 21 8y agoYeah, I probably visit YouTube to read the comments. And Giphy.com to admire their logo.
- mattnewton 8y agoI used to go to CNN to read the news before they started autoplaying video with ads on the top third of my screen.
- efreak 8y agoI visit YouTube on rare occasions because I can't find anything else telling me how to do something. The first thing I do is to read the video description and comments looking for a summary, and not actually watch the video. I detest having to watch long video how-tos, as, among other things, it prevents simple side-by-side comparisons and looking at multiple steps simultaneously. Take the work you put into making a good video and use it to make an actual diagram for your diy instructions instead.
- gumby 8y agoI do in fact use YouTube that way: read the notes (or ideally transcript!), sometimes the comments to see if video is worth watching. There are of course cases where video can be useful (showing how to access some part of some device, perhaps) but for me mostly it's too low a ratio of info/unit time. I do understand that not everybody feels this way.
- roca 8y agoEach of those cases is far more difficult than you imply, because the browser has to try to distinguish legitimate usage of APIs from the usage you want to block. For example there is no "display an ad" DOM API or HTML element. There are simply APIs that put text and images on the page, and you're asking the browser to figure out which are ads and block them. There is a window.open API that can open a new window, and it has legitimate uses that you don't want to block (e.g. pop out Gmail reply to its own window). Even "playing a video" is tricky because Web pages can play video without using the <video> element, e.g. just flipping through a list of static images, which is not blockable in practice. So in practice the browser does have to do a lot of work to filter out unwanted behaviors.
- goombastic 8y agoI am going back to using Lynx next.
- 52-6F-62 8y agoUp next: 'Detects Lynx/2.8.5rel.1 libwww-FM/2.15FC SSL-MM/1.4.1c OpenSSL/0.9.7e-dev' autoplays full-viewport ASCII rendering of [big-pc-co] advertising their weekly DOORBUSTER SALE OF THE YEAR
- JohnFen 8y agoIt would be nice if they could provide similar blocking for video autoplay even if it is muted.
- gnode 8y agoYou can set this with a config setting: media.autoplay.allow-muted false
- UI_at_80x24 8y agoFantastic, now prevent all shit from playing until (wait for it, this is magical in concept): I HIT PLAY. Fuck youtube, et al. from "playing just because I opened that tab". What is I only wanted to read comments, or an article, or just because I want to control my interaction on my own terms?!? Seriously fuck you. FF used to be able to do that. Why was it removed?
- SquareWheel 8y agoYou go to Youtube to read the comments...?
- UI_at_80x24 8y agoOf course not, it's an old joke (meme) from PlayBoy. "I only read it for the articles."
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jasode 8y agoOn related note... I came across a webpage yesterday with autoplaying video that doesn't respond to the GUI: https://www.denverpost.com/2019/01/31/wade-phillips-masterful-super-bowl-tom-brady/ https://www.denverpost.com/2019/01/31/wade-phillips-masterfu... If you click on the video to unmute it, you can't click again on the pause or mute icons to stop it or mute it. This behavior of ignoring your clicks happens in both Chrome and Firefox. Even clicking on Chrome's tab area with the little speaker icon doesn't mute it. To stop it, you can click on the video window's hamburger menu -- or close out the entire tab. I don't know if it's aggressive javascript tricks or a bug in the browsers. It was the first webpage I found where Chrome's speaker icon on the page's tab couldn't mute the audio.
- Zarel 8y agoThat looks like a scripting bug. What it's doing is that it's intercepting your click on the video, preventing the default click action (of pausing the video), and then manually pausing the video. I would assume this is for cross-compatibility: Some browsers would pause the video, and others wouldn't, so the script interception makes it so the video correctly pauses on all browsers. On my computer, it plays/pauses without issue. Most likely, you've configured your computer to disallow the prevention of the default click action, so when you click, it toggles the play/pause state to pause, and then the script toggles it again, back to play. As for Chrome's tab area, the little speaker icon no longer mutes sites as of Chrome 70 or so. You now have to right-click on the tab and click "Mute Site", which works normally for this video.
- jasode 8y ago>As for Chrome's tab area, the little speaker icon no longer mutes sites as of Chrome 70 or so. Thank you for mentioning this so I can retain my sanity. It would have never occurred to me that Google would remove a useful feature like that. (Although I can see that a right-click-mute is more useful when there are dozens of tabs that narrow the widths too much to show a speaker icon.) It must have been pure coincidence that I haven't had a need to mute a webpage since Chrome 70. I was puzzled why both my Firefox and Chrome couldn't stop the video and your comment about the javascript click events made me look at my DNS logs. I noticed that my firewall blocks a lot of sites like "js.spotx.tv", "ntv.io", etc that's loaded by "denverpost.com" -- therefore I may be preventing some (ad) scripts from running that makes the GUI "fixes" you mentioned.
- stevehiehn 8y agoDidn't chrome just do this as well?
- spacesuitman2 8y agoHow does this work with allowed website iframes?
- anticensor 8y agoI think the parent frame's autoplay setting would apply.
- adamredwoods 8y agoI don't understand why there isn't a button next to the url bar in the browser that can allow/disallow auto-playing audio and/or video. This should be an easily accessible on/off switch.
- fdggdfsvscvsd 8y agoCan't wait!
- m0zg 8y agoAll nice features, but until they have proper profile management (and not just awkward "containers") it's a no-go for anyone who has to access job-related web sites from their personal device. Which on this site is probably most of us. Chrome got this right many years ago. Mozilla refuses.
- CorpusCalcium 8y ago>Mozilla refuses. about:profiles
- m0zg 8y agoIt's about as good as not having it at all. Check out Chrome's _usable_ implementation, where I have such a breakthrough (and apparently insurmountable for Mozilla) feature as conveniently switching between profiles.
- CorpusCalcium 8y agoWow, is it really that difficult to click "launch profile in a new browser"? I mean I know we're all becoming spoiled brats over time, but to consider a click or two "unusable" is truly beyond the pale.
- m0zg 8y agoConsiderably more difficult than continuing to use Chrome, where I can switch users without leaving the main UI, including through the menu.
- CorpusCalcium 8y agoWell then use Chrome, where you don't have to suffer the pea under your mattress that is typing about:profiles once in a while.
- noneeeed 8y agoHaving recently switched from Chrome to FF this is the one feature I miss. I really wish they would implement something as easy to use as the Chrome one. The current system in FF is clunky as hell.
- daveheq 8y agoFirefox still runs slower than any other program on my computers.
- medecau 8y agoI see, you don't have Chrome installed.
- beaconfield 8y agoAWESOME! This will make my life so much better, sadly.
- prike 8y agoFirefox, not the hero we deserve, but what we need.
- fazlerocks 8y agoFinally! :D
- Groxx 8y ago66 has been around in the dev release for a while now, and I love this feature. I can finally visit a news sites, and not have a random unrelated article's video with sound (usually off-screen) start playing.
- richjdsmith 8y agoJust a heads up, it also includes blocking timers ringing set on DDG and Google. I found that out the hard way with over-hard boiled eggs two days in a row.
- ryanisnan 8y agoAccording to the post you can whitelist those properties to allow autoplaying.
- karolg 8y agoI hate autoplay so much that probably no one in the whole universe hates it more than me. This is the stupidest human invention ever. </rant> I'm really grateful for customizability of firefox. I discovered "media.block-play-until-visible" in about:config some time ago and I hope that they don't have plans of removing that option in the future.
- bgroins 8y ago"media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground" if you're searching for this.
- cmurf 8y agoIf you're not imagining physical assault on the people in power who decide to enable autoplay for their content, then I'm certain there are people who hate it more than you do. But I also definitely think the people who enable autoplay, lack a certain kind of imagination that people could possibly be driven to irrational levels of hate because of this misfeature. But then this also applies to spam and spammers.
- karolg 8y agoI'm not planning any physical assault :D and I don't think that any software is worth any assault. It is just a tool, if I don't like it, I modify it or change to a completely new tool. The good thing is that I'm a programmer, I know the basics of c++ and js so I can just look around in firefox's source code and find interesting things that could make my web browsing experience better.
- jamesgeck0 8y agoI'm curious if this will break any older browser games.
- IAmNotElonMusk 8y agoThey're talking about YOU, CNN and YouTube!!! Here's a somewhat temporary fix: In a new browser tab type in "about:config" without the quotes. Next agree to the disclaimer. Next look up these options in the search box and change them to the following values: media.autoplay.ask-permission true media.autoplay.default 1 media.autoplay.enabled.user-gestures-needed true Or look for similar names if not exactly the ones above as they change per version of Firefox. No need to wait for an update to Firefox 66.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dmolony 8y agoWhy wasn't this done 65 versions ago?
- jointhefuture 8y agoSomeone should make a service and browser plugin "boycotttheautolay.org" It will insert a screen covering block "do not do business with XYZ" for any company who's ads autoplay. maybe you can even get money for it if you claim you use deep learning to figure out the contents of the video ads.
- musicale 8y agoThis is long overdue. Now if someone could just fix the autoplay setting in Safari so that it actually does what it claims to do. Oh, and also fix the "block pop-ups" feature so that it actually blocks the obnoxious pop-ups that follow you around as you scroll (and often include annoying autoplay videos, demands to "subscribe to our newsletter," etc..) Edit: Wait, "Muted autoplay is still allowed?" Why is it so hard to stamp out the scourge of autoplay? :(
- m0dest 8y agoBecause animated GIFs are already muted, autoplaying videos. If you don't give web devs an efficient way to play silent animations and videos, they resort to horrible and inefficient hacks (animated GIF, image sprites, drawing video frames to a canvas, etc.) Safari allows you to change the autoplay blocker to include all media, not just audible. But, for the web in general, muted autoplay is the right default.
- BearsAreCool 8y agoIs there any current way (chromium or firefox) to mute all sites until I specifically ask to unmute a website? There are only 2 websites I use that I want to play audio.
- the100rabh 8y agoThank you Mozilla for blocking this annoyance. Firefox you will rise from the ashes again.
- babuskov 8y ago:( I have a couple of HTML4 DOM-based games. Looks like I should prepare for gazillion of support requests saying that the sound stopped working in the game. So, what should I do, rewrite everything from scratch in HTML5 and tax CPU/GPU unnecessary. Another instance of asss ruining the technology for everyone else.
- gamanoid 8y agoI'm sorry if this is a naive question, but won't your games have a "PLAY/START GAME" button? If not, wouldn't adding one satisfy the requirement for user interaction on the page?
- babuskov 8y agoIt does have the start button. Does this mean that after a single click you can play sounds as much as you can? If that is the case, I guess it's fine.
- alinspired 8y agoto block in FF63 and newer, change in about:config media.autoplay.default -> 1 media.autoplay.enabled -> false
- krigath 8y agoThe Brave browser (https://brave.com https://brave.com) has been doing this for a while. I'd recommend it. It's faster, saves bandwidth and blocks the majority of ads. Only downside is that I have to explicitly let my online bank see my location in order to log in.
- jakeogh 8y agosurf: ahead! http://git.suckless.org/surf/commit/723ff26c3618cf4db1ae34688509cbcdfed1412f.html http://git.suckless.org/surf/commit/723ff26c3618cf4db1ae3468...