4 ms·

I wish it had been ALL video, audible or not.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago
Would you rather websites keep using animated GIFs instead? Because I think this is why GIFs are still in active use despite being a terrible format in terms of compression/bandwidth: browsers impose all of these limitations on video, which don't apply to GIFs because they're images.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  I want no auto-play video regardless of format. Am I really in the minority?
  - tanelpoder 4y ago
    Yup, this baffles me too. The counterarguments seem to be that "you're gonna see autoplaying content anyway and this just makes the advertisers life harder". I think Google added an option to disable all/most autoplaying content in Chrome a couple of years ago. But they quickly backtracked and removed that flag, claiming that it breaks in-browser games or something like that. It's a pretty weak reason for me, I don't care about in-browser games, I just want to read a news article without some irrelevant video popup distracting me, plus blasting audio.
- amalcon 4y ago
  Nothing requires a browser to auto-play animated GIFs.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    If you back that off it breaks tons of sites and the really annoying ones move to a hundred jpegs. And trying to stop that is not going to be easy.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      just don't visit those websites that perform user hostile shenanigans like that.
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    No, but animated GIFs have been standard in browsers for so long that I think you'd end up breaking lots of things. Loading spinners, for example, are often GIFs. Maybe you'd prefer if those were static, but suspect many users would think a website and/or their browser was broken if they didn't move.
  - ladzoppelin 4y ago
    In Firefox "image.animation_mode: once", fixes the issue. (Unless I am miss-understanding the issue you are talking about)
- steponlego 4y ago
  You can pause animated .gifs, Opera had this feature over twenty years ago.
Zak 4y ago
There are extensions that do that.
- tanelpoder 4y ago
  Which ones reliably work these days? (I have tried a few in past, none of them actually disabled all videos/popups with sound and moving content)
  - Zak 4y ago
    Here's the one I'm using. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-autoplay/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-autop...
NavinF 4y ago
That would result in all those videos getting replaced with gifs and wasting more resources.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  I don’t see advertisers and news sites replacing those with animated GIFs.
- tanelpoder 4y ago
  What if I don't care about advertiser efficiency and just want to read a webpage with static content (without video popups and audio unasked for). (Yes I know such sites/tricks may increase my download traffic and brower CPU usage, etc, but I would just stop using such sites then, as I do now)
varenc 4y ago
Read the comment section on the article for some discussion on this. Firefox does allow users to opt-in to inaudible autoplay video blocking but it’s not the default. The reasoning is that advertisers can approximate video with canvas tags, gifs, or just swapping out images really fast, defeating the point and needlessly burning more CPU/bandwidth. But for users that care you can still opt-in to this behavior and presumably few enough people do this that the workarounds aren’t widespread. (The key difference seems to be that playing audio has a clear path that’s straightforward to block but “video” can be approximated by any webpage interactivity making it harder to lock down)
- wkat4242 4y ago
  Even if Firefox made it the default it would not be widespread because its marketshare is so low. Also I bet most of the users still running Firefox are quite technical and most likely are blocking ads anyway.
joveian 4y ago
You almost can, other than the annoying animated image exception (I would really like media controls on those, you can currently only set them to play once, never, or infinitely). Privacy and Security -> under "Permissions" click settings next to autoplay -> select "Block Audio and Video" under "default for all websites". For animated images I'm not sure if it is exposed in the UI but in about:config change image.animation_mode to "once". If you want to replay it after that, you will need to open the image in a new tab. It is somewhat easy to miss them with this setting since even images at the bottom of the page will start their single animation when you hit pagedown (even if you move the page view up again almost immediately). Mostly this autoplay blocking has been wonderful, a massive improvement. The one slight annoyance I've noticed is that the exceptions managament isn't as flexible as uBlock origin's configuration and you can't tell Firefox to unblock all of Bandcamp. I'm not sure if this is something that could potentially be done in an addon. The other thing I'd really like is a way to default "loop" to off on media controls so that I can just play the media once by default when I do play it. Oh yeah, for some reason I can't imagine Twitter tries hard to make videos repeat and current autoplay restrictions aren't able to stop that (I don't have an account so I suspect this is a "fuck you for not making an account" thing. I can't imagine anyone putting up with that more than briefly).

Would you rather websites keep using animated GIFs instead? Because I think this is why GIFs are still in active use despite being a terrible format in terms of compression/bandwidth: browsers impose all of these limitations on video, which don't apply to GIFs because they're images.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
I want no auto-play video regardless of format. Am I really in the minority?
- tanelpoder 4y ago
  Yup, this baffles me too. The counterarguments seem to be that "you're gonna see autoplaying content anyway and this just makes the advertisers life harder". I think Google added an option to disable all/most autoplaying content in Chrome a couple of years ago. But they quickly backtracked and removed that flag, claiming that it breaks in-browser games or something like that. It's a pretty weak reason for me, I don't care about in-browser games, I just want to read a news article without some irrelevant video popup distracting me, plus blasting audio.
amalcon 4y ago
Nothing requires a browser to auto-play animated GIFs.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  If you back that off it breaks tons of sites and the really annoying ones move to a hundred jpegs. And trying to stop that is not going to be easy.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    just don't visit those websites that perform user hostile shenanigans like that.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  No, but animated GIFs have been standard in browsers for so long that I think you'd end up breaking lots of things. Loading spinners, for example, are often GIFs. Maybe you'd prefer if those were static, but suspect many users would think a website and/or their browser was broken if they didn't move.
- ladzoppelin 4y ago
  In Firefox "image.animation_mode: once", fixes the issue. (Unless I am miss-understanding the issue you are talking about)
steponlego 4y ago
You can pause animated .gifs, Opera had this feature over twenty years ago.

Zak 4y ago

There are extensions that do that.

tanelpoder 4y ago
Which ones reliably work these days? (I have tried a few in past, none of them actually disabled all videos/popups with sound and moving content)
- Zak 4y ago
  Here's the one I'm using. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-autoplay/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-autop...

NavinF 4y ago

That would result in all those videos getting replaced with gifs and wasting more resources.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
I don’t see advertisers and news sites replacing those with animated GIFs.
tanelpoder 4y ago
What if I don't care about advertiser efficiency and just want to read a webpage with static content (without video popups and audio unasked for). (Yes I know such sites/tricks may increase my download traffic and brower CPU usage, etc, but I would just stop using such sites then, as I do now)

varenc 4y ago

Read the comment section on the article for some discussion on this. Firefox does allow users to opt-in to inaudible autoplay video blocking but it’s not the default. The reasoning is that advertisers can approximate video with canvas tags, gifs, or just swapping out images really fast, defeating the point and needlessly burning more CPU/bandwidth. But for users that care you can still opt-in to this behavior and presumably few enough people do this that the workarounds aren’t widespread. (The key difference seems to be that playing audio has a clear path that’s straightforward to block but “video” can be approximated by any webpage interactivity making it harder to lock down)

wkat4242 4y ago
Even if Firefox made it the default it would not be widespread because its marketshare is so low. Also I bet most of the users still running Firefox are quite technical and most likely are blocking ads anyway.

joveian 4y ago

You almost can, other than the annoying animated image exception (I would really like media controls on those, you can currently only set them to play once, never, or infinitely). Privacy and Security -> under "Permissions" click settings next to autoplay -> select "Block Audio and Video" under "default for all websites". For animated images I'm not sure if it is exposed in the UI but in about:config change image.animation_mode to "once". If you want to replay it after that, you will need to open the image in a new tab. It is somewhat easy to miss them with this setting since even images at the bottom of the page will start their single animation when you hit pagedown (even if you move the page view up again almost immediately). Mostly this autoplay blocking has been wonderful, a massive improvement. The one slight annoyance I've noticed is that the exceptions managament isn't as flexible as uBlock origin's configuration and you can't tell Firefox to unblock all of Bandcamp. I'm not sure if this is something that could potentially be done in an addon. The other thing I'd really like is a way to default "loop" to off on media controls so that I can just play the media once by default when I do play it. Oh yeah, for some reason I can't imagine Twitter tries hard to make videos repeat and current autoplay restrictions aren't able to stop that (I don't have an account so I suspect this is a "fuck you for not making an account" thing. I can't imagine anyone putting up with that more than briefly).