I really dislike auto-playing audio and video as well, for all the reasons you mentioned, but also for a less logical reason: it just makes it feel like the browser isn't on your side. If a site is automatically playing audio or a video advert, its design is not in the user's interest, so in that situation your software has to choose whose side to take. I just want and expect the software I have installed on my computer to take my side, and always act in my interests. It probably sounds silly but I just think software should always be primarily designed for the end user.
Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
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Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
#12firefox -> about:config -> media.autoplay.enabled = false
additionally the dom.audiochannel.mutedByDefault and media.default_volume settings may also be useful if you want slightly different behavior.
If you want a more blunt tool you can also use content blockers to block media content until you opt into it for a particular site.
> I know there are plugins than can somewhat do this, but no solutions are universal or great.
How so? There are about a dozen FF addons covering different use-cases like muting inactive tabs or all tabs but a designated one. If none of them meet your particular expectations that might also indicate that everyone wants something different and it is difficult for browser vendors to cover all expectations. Maybe you should modify an existing addon instead to do what you want.
Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
#13I wrote https://github.com/ludios/mute-new-tabs and I am now happier with a quiet Chrome. The idea is to mute all new tabs and unmute them only when you interact with an in-page volume control (or manually unmute via the tab icon/context menu). This solves only the sound problem though, not the data consumption.
Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
#14There should be a media play permission just like there is for accessing your webcam or showing notifications. You give the permission once to a website such as youtube, and from them on videos would play automatically for the domain youtube.com. No videos would play on any website to which you deny this permission.
Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
#15This behavior is so bad that I have changed my browsing behavior. I visit only selected, trusted news sites, as "free" sites are horrible offenders here. Google is much less useful while on desktops as it is likely to return obnoxious websites. So far I have not had a bad autoplay problem on iOS. However a growing problem is obnoxious pop up ads that are difficult to escape. Overall more of my Internet usage is shift…
You're implying that the web has gotten worse, but in my experience it used to be much worse. Just the memory of the sea of pop-ups that you had to fight when browsing the web makes my stomach turn.
However, there seem to be a recent trend in auto-platyng video, in fact this is not only happening on the web but on apps too like Facebook and Twitter.
Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
#16> In the worst cases such as on mobile browsers like iOS Safari
What site does this? You can't (auto)play media on iOS without direct user action for exactly the reason you specified.
iOS 10 changed this slightly to allow silent or muted videos to autoplay when visible on the screen https://webkit.org/blog/6784/new-video-policies-for-ios/
Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
#17There are a couple Chromium bugs filed about this: https://crbug.com/107923 and https://crbug.com/514102
Overriding autoplay can lead to a confusing user experience -- play/pause synchronization issue with embedded YouTube videos: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1217438
The Disable HTML5 Autoplay extension is often suggested for Chrome, and it has 112,213 users, but it's far from perfect: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-auto...
Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
#18firefox -> about:config -> media.autoplay.enabled = false additionally the dom.audiochannel.mutedByDefault and media.default_volume settings may also be useful if you want slightly different behavior. If you want a more blunt tool you can also use content blockers to block media content until you opt into it for a particular site. > I know there are plugins than can somewhat do this, but no solutions are universal or…
Did that buy youtube is still on autoplay.
Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
#19firefox -> about:config -> media.autoplay.enabled = false additionally the dom.audiochannel.mutedByDefault and media.default_volume settings may also be useful if you want slightly different behavior. If you want a more blunt tool you can also use content blockers to block media content until you opt into it for a particular site. > I know there are plugins than can somewhat do this, but no solutions are universal or…
Did that buy youtube is still on autoplay.
https://gist.github.com/ivan/4a5c10930629f1c7b2a05857268c4c2... if you want a userscript
Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
#20I am now a victim of the adage, "Be careful what you wish for because you might just get it".
I hated Flash. I either avoided installing it or used a Flash blocker. So I always managed to avoid the auto-playing problem when the Internet primarily used Flash for everything annoying.
Now that Flash is about dead and everything is HTML5 now, neither of these techniques work any more to avoid auto-playing.