4 ms·

Because breaking sites like Soundcloud and Youtube by default seems like an overreaction to the abuse of auto-playing sound

falcor84 8y ago
To me it seems to be a very reasonable reaction to a terrible situation. As long as it's easy to whitelist a domain, I'm very happy about this development.
danShumway 8y ago
This change will already do that; Firefox doesn't whitelist sites by default. My personal preference would have been to mute tabs by default rather than blocking autoplay: - Sites can't detect a muted tab with JS, so they can't use it for tracking or block services behind it. - Nothing would break. Firefox did a pretty good job of minimizing the potential breakage from this change, but there are still edge cases and some weird logic that's required to address them. A muted tab is no different than you unplugging the speakers from your computer. It'll never cause a Javascript error. - It's simpler from a user perspective. You can already mute a tab. Why do we need another control that's meant to fulfill the same purpose? The counter-argument is that blocking autoplay is actually about saving data, but in reality: - The restrictions are trivial to bypass, since you can just start playing after the first user gesture/action. - Muted videos are still allowed to autoplay. So if you're trying to save data, it would still be a lot better to just have an option to block audio/video entirely, not just of the autoplaying variety. As far as I can tell, Mozilla basically got kind of railroaded into this implementation because that's what Google did, and that set the general narrative. Mozilla ended up with a better implementation than Google, but this is still one of those restrictions where I feel like 2-3 years from now we're going to look back and say, "yeah, this wasn't really thought through all the way."

4 ms·

Because breaking sites like Soundcloud and Youtube by default seems like an overreaction to the abuse of auto-playing sound

by peterlk 8y ago

falcor84 8y ago
To me it seems to be a very reasonable reaction to a terrible situation. As long as it's easy to whitelist a domain, I'm very happy about this development.
danShumway 8y ago
This change will already do that; Firefox doesn't whitelist sites by default. My personal preference would have been to mute tabs by default rather than blocking autoplay: - Sites can't detect a muted tab with JS, so they can't use it for tracking or block services behind it. - Nothing would break. Firefox did a pretty good job of minimizing the potential breakage from this change, but there are still edge cases and some weird logic that's required to address them. A muted tab is no different than you unplugging the speakers from your computer. It'll never cause a Javascript error. - It's simpler from a user perspective. You can already mute a tab. Why do we need another control that's meant to fulfill the same purpose? The counter-argument is that blocking autoplay is actually about saving data, but in reality: - The restrictions are trivial to bypass, since you can just start playing after the first user gesture/action. - Muted videos are still allowed to autoplay. So if you're trying to save data, it would still be a lot better to just have an option to block audio/video entirely, not just of the autoplaying variety. As far as I can tell, Mozilla basically got kind of railroaded into this implementation because that's what Google did, and that set the general narrative. Mozilla ended up with a better implementation than Google, but this is still one of those restrictions where I feel like 2-3 years from now we're going to look back and say, "yeah, this wasn't really thought through all the way."