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Some notes on Firefox’s media autoplay settings in practice as of Firefox 124
- kevingadd 3y agoI still find it distasteful that Chrome's autoplay policy was "we allowlist a 'fair' list of popular websites that happens to include all of our big domains", when the UX for that isn't meaningfully better than the way it works in Firefox. I can't imagine it actually had much of a positive impact on Google's metrics either, so it felt like a huge waste of effort + additional complexity for nothing. I wonder if the Firefox team ever considered taking the same approach to make Youtube "just work". Clicking allow the first time and never thinking about it again is pretty easy.
- butz 3y agoThere need to be more strict settings for autoplay, not only for video and audio, but for huge GIF files too. I'd put them under "energy saving" settings, as reduced network activity would benefit for server too, not to mention all CPU cycles saved for not decoding all media on client side. Autoplay activation triggers should be reviewed as well, as some sites will happily start autoplaying all media after scrolling down using main scrollbar. That's probably only me, but I still consider scrollbar a part of browsers chrome, not part of website. So interacting with it should not give any hints to website, at least where media autoplay is concerned.
- Semaphor 3y agoI wish gif’s adhered to prefers-reduced-motion and preferably only played on interaction. I use Toggle Animated Gifs [0], but it’s a global on/off switch, requires a reload, and doesn’t show a hint that something could be animated. [0]: https://github.com/M-Reimer/toggleanigif https://github.com/M-Reimer/toggleanigif
- mikae1 3y agoimage.animation_mode = none im about:config.
- Semaphor 3y agoDoesn’t that completely disable them, only without the convenience of a toggle?
- paulryanrogers 3y agoYes. You can also use 'once' to have them stop after first playthrough.
- Semaphor 3y agoYeah, but the extension is already offering that with more convenience. What I’m looking for is a better solution, as described in my post.
- antegamisou 3y agoThe worst thing is those websites that have some type of 2160p type of video autoplay as a background image, making it unbrowsable on cheaper hardware devices. But this is more a rant for modern webdev practices I'm not sure much can be done to circumvent it from a browser perspective.
- nine_k 3y agoBack when Opera was a worthy browser, around 2000, it had various bandwidth-saving and CPU-saving controls. In particular, it had buttons to prevent loading of large images, and IIRC for gif autoplay.
- palmfacehn 3y agoSend a HEAD request. If the file size is over the threshold, don't load it without user consent.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y agoA perfect idea for the people who almost certainly aren’t using “cheaper hardware devices”.
- rightbyte 3y agoI don't need any strict settings for autoplay. I don't need autoplay. Maybe there could be like a 2Mb cap on each page load that you'd manually had to extend the quota on. Most sites that need more are accidental visits anyway. That should work even if the site is user hostile.
- dylan604 3y agoHow would that cap work? Would the browser be expected to calculate the size of all elements by querying them all before loading anything? Would the browser just start downloading content counting bits as it goes, and then just stop when it reached 2Mb? What if the page was laid out in such a way that the JS includes were >2Mb? Just a second of though about the comment made would show so many issues with the idea, that maybe the idea isn't really a good one. At the least it would provide pause that maybe some sort of refinement is required to be taken seriously by anyone else.
- palmfacehn 3y agohttps://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9110.html#name-head https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9110.html#name-head
- edflsafoiewq 3y agoWhat would happen if you yanked the ethernet cord after 2Mb transferred? Same thing. You can't precalculate the size since resources are added dynamically (and you can't trust HEAD anyway).
- qwery 3y agoIf you want all the javascript, don't count the javascript against the quota. If you don't want videos that you're never going to play deliberately, set the video quota to zero.
- skydhash 3y agoit's rare for the html file and the associated css is bigger than 2MB (much epub books is lighter than that if you reduce image size). The culprit are often media (fonts included), JS files, and files loaded dynamically. I'd say get the HTML and CSS files first, then JS and everything else and stops after the 2MB threshold. A lot of currently running JS code are unnecessary and I say this as a React developer.
- thejohnconway 3y agoPeople will start animating with JavaScript through canvas or other hacks (like rapidly changing the img src to play frames manually). Not sure if this is winnable with the all-powerful JavaScript sitting there nearly always available.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoYou win by running NoScript and blacklisting the modern web BS.
- RobotToaster 3y agoNot wrong. Most browsers included a popup blocker because everyone agreed popups are annoying, now nearly every website has 3 different JS popups.
- dylan604 3y agohonestly, I still feel like that is a win for users. pop-ups that are modals on a site is not anywhere close to open application windows, especially the pop-unders. to me, opening another application window on my system is much more abhorrent than a site deciding it wants my attention somewhere else on its site.
- ryandrake 3y agoYou are right, but it’s at least one step in the right direction. Browsers are so timid when it comes to giving users control, I’ll take anything. I don’t get this web developer attitude of just ignoring the user’s preference and working around it. The user should be in control of what the browser is doing, not the web developer. I really want to love JavaScript but it’s power to override user preferences is inexcusable.
- skydhash 3y agoI like Safari, but it does not want me to enable JavaScript per site.
- maxcoder4 3y agoUblock origin has this feature where it blocks large media files automatically (you have to click to load them). I use it for a long time and never had problems because of it.
- thisislife2 3y agoWhich settings are you specifically referring to in uBlock O? I didn't find any 'click-to-load' option for 'Block media elements larger than' option?
- lesona 3y agoCheck out uBlock Origin's per site switches - subheading "No large media elements" [1] [1]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-large-media-elements https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...
- schiffern 3y agoThen they said "click to load" they meant "click [the toggle button in the uBlock Origin panel] to load," not "click [the media element] to load."
- forgotmyinfo 3y agoNot sure what I'm doing, but whatever I'm using with uBlock Origin lets me click the media element to load it.
- ZephyrOhm 3y agoCheck out yokoffing's uBO filter lists. Specifically #2 "click2load" which does exactly what you're seeking. Making auto play content click to load. https://github.com/yokoffing/filterlists?tab=readme-ov-file https://github.com/yokoffing/filterlists?tab=readme-ov-file
- dredmorbius 3y agoThis is a further issue for those using e-ink devices (tablets, e-book readers, monitors), where rapid animation at higher quality settings is exceedingly disruptive --- stuttering, screen-flashing, and the like. (It is possible to display animations, if desired, at reasonable refresh rates using lower-quality display settings, e-ink offers a trade-off between text quality (resolution, ghosting) and refresh rates. But as if there needed to be additional arguments to put a hard stop on highly-distracting design elements, this really stands out.) I've also found it ... interesting ... to note that a single Web page often has the memory footprint of an entire book (a few MB for just plain text, though that can balloon upwards with complex typesetting and graphics), and that even a browser optimised for e-ink (Einkbro) has roughly 10x the power consumption of the stock ebook reader (Neoreader) on my Onyx BOOX tablet (labeled as an e-book reader, but in fact an e-ink based Android tablet). I can read books for days on a single battery charge. I can browse the Web for ... a few hours.
- skydhash 3y agoWhile the web allows for a lot of creative expressions, I think we should have companion protocols for alternate consumptions methods, something like Gemini for every page. An e-ink reader is good for focused reading, but bad for interactive or animated content. Just like gwern.net allows to add `.page` to every link and get the raw source, you could add `.gemini` to wikipedia pages and get a much simpler document that you can read on e-ink reader or a cli device (should be good for accessibility too).
- csande17 3y agoWikipedia kinda has this already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Swift?action=render https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Swift?action=render https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Swift?action=raw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Swift?action=raw
- dredmorbius 3y agoWikisource as well, where one can choose HTML, ePub, or PDF on most documents. Other sites permit one to append ".json" for a raw JSON feed.
- musicale 3y agoYou had one job, browser "never auto-play" setting....
- Unfrozen0688 3y agoI have found Firefox is the only browser to correctly block Autoplay. I block all then manual whitelist for domains like Youtube. Edge, Brave, Chrome seems to work sometimes, or worse, only lets me block audio and not video.
- EasyMark 3y agoI haven't noticed it not working in brave, but I don't use it a whole lot. Mostly just when a site gives me heartburn in firefox
- ano-ther 3y agoIs there any way to block autoplay on iOS Safari? Those videos are especially annoying when you have a low-bandwidth mobile connection.
- lapcat 3y agoMy own extension StopTheMadness Pro: https://apps.apple.com/app/stopthemadness-pro/id6471380298 https://apps.apple.com/app/stopthemadness-pro/id6471380298
- orhmeh09 3y agoStopTheMadness is amazing. Thank you.
- cassianoleal 3y agoThat extension is incredible, I've been using it for years and have recently upgraded to Pro. Any chance you'll publish it for Linux?
- lapcat 3y ago> Any chance you'll publish it for Linux? Sorry, no, I don't use Linux.
- Alifatisk 3y agoI wish there was a way to fully disable the picture-in-picture feature so it never appears on any website again.
- Zetobal 3y agoIt's a giant checkbox in the browsing settings...
- Alifatisk 3y agoYou mean the "Enable picture-in-picture video controls"?
- logro 3y agoI occasionally use that feature. But absolutely every single time is by mistake and it has negative effects on my mood. Still love Firefox though.
- extraduder_ire 3y agoI managed to somehow disable the button that appears on the video without totally disabling the feature. I find it a lot more ergonomic to hit ctrl+shift+] to toggle it. I pretty much only use it for videos yt-dlp + mpv can't open though.
- 3y ago
- narag 3y agoThat was actually useful. Since I stopped logging in to YouTube, autoplaying the next video has been a PITA.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- karmakaze 3y agoI always just toggle autoplay off as soon as I can after opening one. It's hardly even a conscious action anymore. Is this what was meant in TFA: > Youtube these days does have a reliable 'disable autoplay' setting Other than not-logged-in/private mode it always works for me.
- narag 3y agoI was doing that, but it's much better to have it automated. Now, I see there are side effects for other sites, but now I can fine tune it.
- mholt 3y ago> I've been buying digital music from one of the reasonably good online sources of it (the one that recently got acquired, again, making people nervous about its longer term future). Which store is being referred to here?
- foxhop 3y agodid you know that browsers will not autoplay video tags unless the video is also muted?
- Edidiongben9 3y ago[flagged]
- nfriedly 3y agoI don't know if it's still the case, but a while back Firefox would allow muted looping videos to auto play, basically like an animated gif. However, if the video had an audio track (even muted) it would keep the computer from sleeping. Some of adafruits documentation pages had exactly this combination, so leaving a single page of documentation open would keep my computer from automatically sleeping.
- foxhop 3y agoyeah I just tested this, autoplay only works on the video tag if muted which seems like it defeats the point.
- afavour 3y agoIt’s specifically to replace GIFs. If you don’t allow autoplay of muted videos people will just use GIFs which are way, way more bandwidth intensive. It keeping your computer awake sounds like a bug though, it’s not intended behavior.
- padenot 3y agoPlease open a bug at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core&component=Audio%2FVideo%3A%20playback https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core&comp... if that's the case, and CC padenot@mozilla.com, I'll have a look next week.
- nfriedly 3y agoHere's the bug I filed several years ago: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1684718 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1684718 - I just cc'd you
- afavour 3y agoI interpreted the comments on that bug to mean that the Adafruit site has an unmuted video that happens to have a silent audio track, which isn’t strictly a muted autoplay issue. But maybe I’m wrong.
- zagrebian 3y agoIt would be useful if Firefox recorded which configs the user changed. Imagine if you could view a chronological, tabular list of all configs that you changed. Name, default value, changed value, date.
- Falell 3y agoFirefox has all of this except the date. `about:config` lists all config values, values in bold do not match their default or do not exist by default, values can be reverted with one click, and there's a checkbox to filter out unmodified items.
- narag 3y agoBut does that include the personalized settings for a specific site? I mean Tools menu -> Page Info -> Permissions An example: the gong doesn't sounds when a game starts in lichess if you have autoplay disabled for sound. You need to allow that for the site. There are other configurations there like accepting cookies, etc.
- zagrebian 3y agoconfigs the user changed != values in bold do not match their default or do not exist by default
- caditinpiscinam 3y agoFirefox's default "allow autoplay after interaction" policy doesn't help much in the case of SPAs. Go to a site like ESPN and autoplay will be blocked on the first "page" you visit, but navigating to any subsequent "pages" ends up enabling autoplay since link clicks are intercepted and Javascripted away. What I really want browsers to adopt is an SPA breaking policy, where click handlers for <a> elements are ignored for non-whitelisted sites.
- pier25 3y agoWhy would you want to break SPAs?
- caditinpiscinam 3y agoBecause most SPAs that I interact with (like ESPN) have no business being SPAs (in the sense of hijacking navigation). The main motivation behind constructing them that way seems to be to circumvent UX safeguards.
- pier25 3y agoWouldn't it make more sense to just stop using apps like ESPN instead of breaking a major browser API and big chunk of the internet?
- skydhash 3y agoWould you stop using GitHub as well. They recently move to a SPA models and I think search and readme links were broken for a few days because of history hijacking.
- pier25 3y agoI wouldn't but my point is that a) no one is forcing anyone to use a website and b) it seems absurd to break a major browser API.
- 3y ago
- throwanem 3y agoFirefox has fine-grained site permissions, which probably cover this. The UI is pretty obscure, though, and not discoverable, which may be why this option isn't considered in the article. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/site-permissions-panel https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/site-permissions-panel
- some1else 3y agoI use Safari instead of Chrome when I want twice the autonomy, and it's really strict to websites trying to play media without interaction. It doesn't even start loading YouTube videos until I click the giant play button. You never even see that button in Chrome, and I can't believe how much I now miss that basic sanity check. Chrome will even start playing dozens of tabs simultaneously if I open a collection of tabs from Bookmarks. Really think there should be a setting that enforces the requirement of initial interaction before playback on every site in all browsers.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dredmorbius 3y agoWould Firefox's multi-account containers (<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...>) be a way to set multimedia autoplay and other configurations on a per-site basis? You'd need to set up containers, associate them with specific websites (not sure if this is possible or I'm confusing FFMACs with Chrome's own container feature), and then of course tweak your Firefox configuration as you prefer it for the site(s) associated with each container/account.
- musicale 3y ago> As discussed in Mozilla's wiki page on blocking media autoplay, the default setting for this preference allows autoplay once you've interacted with that tab, I despise this idea with a burning passion. It means that the instant you scroll down the page, or bring up a menu, or "interact" for some definition of the word, BOOM! some obnoxious video starts playing.
- danShumway 3y agoI wrote about this issue back in 2018 regarding specifically Chrome, and Firefox's settings are derivative of Chrome's: https://danshumway.com/blog/chrome-autoplay/ https://danshumway.com/blog/chrome-autoplay/ At the time, there was a lot of noise about the fact that autoplay settings were breaking parts of the web, and I do think that was a problem with Chrome's setup that never really got addressed. My article focused only on Chrome's changes. Firefox's approach was (imo) better -- it didn't have as much of the weird AI-driven "figure out which domains users interact with" nonsense -- but Firefox's approach was still very clearly influenced by Chrome's, and I would argue that Chrome's approach was incorrect. At the time, there were two concerns, and Chrome's approach was only intended to handle one of them: 1. Autoplay videos use a lot of bandwidth 2. Autoplay videos are disruptive (specifically, they make noise) Chrome was worried about #2. They argued (and I agree with this) that these are two separate concerns that need to be tackled separately. But Chrome didn't really go all-in on solving problem #2, they kind of had this weird hybrid approach where they were still trying to stop the data from being streamed, but not always, and if you muted the video it would still be streamed, but if you didn't it wouldn't... So it became the worst of both worlds. At the time I argued (and I still think this would be a better approach) that given that the goal was entirely about stopping audio, this should have all been handled through automatic tab muting, not through a change to the web APIs. That's not to say that blocking large amounts of data or stopping the visual aspects of videos isn't important, but the approach Chrome went with (and that Firefox has subsequently inherited) kind of does nothing well. And I think we still see the effects of that today, even in browsers like Firefox that were admittedly a bit more sensible about not adapting some of Chrome's worst ideas. Interactions were also a sticking point: Chrome interpreted even highlighting text as a signal that autoplay should be allowed -- which is obviously very easily abusable. I generally think that the user-gesture requirement for permissions is not great; it severely limits what users can do on a page while still signaling that they don't want to grant permission for a random action like autoplaying audio. It's a tricky problem to solve, but I also think it's a problem that's harder to solve because of some of the previous baggage we've inherited from previous efforts to solve it.
- Meph504 3y agoI honestly at this point, don't feel the need to have anything auto play, if I want video, or audio, I'm well on able to click a button myself. Auto play = auto advertisement in most cases I encounter it. I can't not see why at this day in age we are prioritizing anyone but the user making the choice of when to play something.
- WirelessGigabit 3y agoI wish it would all be disabled. On iOS it is absolute hell to load any page due to it jumping around, and then you scroll and some video starts playing. Do you want me to read the page? Or get distracted? Either PIP with a too small x, or inline, making me think it's part of the story, but it's just another story about Mary eating 36 pastries and winning the eating contest. For the longest time Ars Technica did this too, with the same video over and over. I can't imagine the bandwidth wasted there.