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Firefox 66 to block automatically playing audible video and audio (2019)

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Re: Firefox 66 to block automatically playing audible video and audio (2019)

#21

Post by tanelpoder »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #13
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I want no auto-play video regardless of format. Am I really in the minority?

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.

Re: Firefox 66 to block automatically playing audible video and audio (2019)

#22

Post by varenc »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #5

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

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)

Re: Firefox 66 to block automatically playing audible video and audio (2019)

#23

Post by H4ZB7 »

when i was 9 and first used the web i was annoyed by how pages can subvert you and steal focus and show popups (and do audio via flash) etc and even then it was unambiguously obvious that this is a misfeature that should not exist. how do these people have such cognitive dissonance over such simple questions other than being so full of themselves that they think pretending to be open minded by pondering such obvious questions is fooling anyone.

you are designing the fabric of a medium where the main use case is to open 20 pages at once from completely random strangers across the internet. OBVIOUSLY it should not autoplay sound by default.

(also the same reasoning explains why JS should not be a thing, because it slows everything down and causes bugs by letting casuals design the fabric instead of the browser just coming with what's needed (you'd think they can do this with trillions of man hours))

Re: Firefox 66 to block automatically playing audible video and audio (2019)

#24

Post by dylan604 »

H4ZB7 wrote: post #23

when i was 9 and first used the web i was annoyed by how pages can subvert you and steal focus and show popups (and do audio via flash) etc and even then it was unambiguously obvious that this is a misfeature that should not exist. how do these people have such cognitive dissonance over such simple questions other than being so full of themselves that they think pretending to be open minded by pondering such obvious…

i was with up until the last paragraph. i like to make fun of javascript as much as the next person (unless you're a dyed in the wool only programs in JS type person, then i make fun of you too ;-) however, the web definitely has benefited from local interactive programming. it just so happens that JS was the language of the web browser. thinking that the internet would be nearly as interesting without some sort of local interactive programming in the browser just screams trolling or someone that really doesn't remember the early days of the web in its full glory.

Re: Firefox 66 to block automatically playing audible video and audio (2019)

#25

Post by dylan604 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #15
amalcon wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing requires a browser to auto-play animated GIFs.

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.

just don't visit those websites that perform user hostile shenanigans like that.

Re: Firefox 66 to block automatically playing audible video and audio (2019)

#26

Post by porcoda »

nntwozz wrote: post #20

This is great. Safari has settings for this but plenty of sites (e.g. yahoo) punch through them anyway. The web has become so incredibly user-hostile in the last decade.

It has always been user hostile since the days of pop-over ads, pop-under ads, obnoxious browser toolbars that were basically malware, etc. It seems like since around the year 2000 it’s been a nonstop fight between people who want to extract money and advertising impressions out of users versus people trying to keep the web user friendly. I think we only had maybe a 5 year run of the web being user-friendly at the beginning, and that was just because people hadn’t quite yet figured out how to extract money from web usage.

Re: Firefox 66 to block automatically playing audible video and audio (2019)

#27

Post by Spivak »

nntwozz wrote: post #20

This is great. Safari has settings for this but plenty of sites (e.g. yahoo) punch through them anyway. The web has become so incredibly user-hostile in the last decade.

The whole "user interaction" permissions model should just be scrapped for an unmute button in the browser chrome.

There’s no way to have permissions that depend on things that happen inside the content box / “unsafe zone” that can’t be gamed.

Re: Firefox 66 to block automatically playing audible video and audio (2019)

#28

Post by Dalewyn »

dylan604 wrote: post #24
H4ZB7 wrote: post #23

when i was 9 and first used the web i was annoyed by how pages can subvert you and steal focus and show popups (and do audio via flash) etc and even then it was unambiguously obvious that this is a misfeature that should not exist. how do these people have such cognitive dissonance over such simple questions other than being so full of themselves that they think pretending to be open minded by pondering such obvious…

i was with up until the last paragraph. i like to make fun of javascript as much as the next person (unless you're a dyed in the wool only programs in JS type person, then i make fun of you too ;-) however, the web definitely has benefited from local interactive programming. it just so happens that JS was the language of the web browser. thinking that the internet would be nearly as interesting without some sort of l…

>thinking that the internet would be nearly as interesting without some sort of local interactive programming in the browser

The internet was more interesting (and usable) before JavaShit became a thing.

Source: Old man shouting at clouds (me) who witnessed and fondly remember the internet of the 90s and early 2000s.

Re: Firefox 66 to block automatically playing audible video and audio (2019)

#30

Post by steponlego »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #8
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #5

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

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.

You can pause animated .gifs, Opera had this feature over twenty years ago.
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