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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)

#31

Post by joveian »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #5

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

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).

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

#32

Post by ladzoppelin »

amalcon wrote: post #14
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.

Nothing requires a browser to auto-play animated GIFs.

In Firefox "image.animation_mode: once", fixes the issue. (Unless I am miss-understanding the issue you are talking about)

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

#33

Post by WirelessGigabit »

I wish they would ban it for all video. The amount of bandwidth eaten on Mobile Devices (not everybody has unlimited data) is insane.

Try and look at an Ars Technica page. Or any random news website. I want to READ the content. Not be distracted by something else.

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

#34

Post by adithyassekhar »

Waterluvian wrote: post #6

I recently made a really basic game engine for my dumb games[1] and discovered something interesting about this limitation: Ctrl does not count as a user interaction. I’m guessing because it’s a modifier key. I wanted my game to have good UX so I cleverly required inputs before any sound would be made. Usually via the game selection screen. But if Ctrl is your “action” key, it doesn’t actually allow the Audio API to…

Some games have Ctrl as their crouch key.

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

#35

Post by wkat4242 »

varenc wrote: post #22
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 pre…

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.

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

#36

Post by ryapric »

adithyassekhar wrote: post #34
Waterluvian wrote: post #6

I recently made a really basic game engine for my dumb games[1] and discovered something interesting about this limitation: Ctrl does not count as a user interaction. I’m guessing because it’s a modifier key. I wanted my game to have good UX so I cleverly required inputs before any sound would be made. Usually via the game selection screen. But if Ctrl is your “action” key, it doesn’t actually allow the Audio API to…

Some games have Ctrl as their crouch key.

Do you know of any browser games that use Ctrl as the crouch key? That's the interface under discussion.

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

#37

Post by quesera »

amluto wrote: post #29

I would prefer that audio require explicit opt-in, not just interaction. The biggest offender I regularly encounter is not even what I would normally consider an evil website: npr.org

My browser never plays audio which I do not explicitly request. That would be madness!

This is my preferred interface for NPR news, and it might address your issue also:

https://text.npr.org/

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

#38

Post by loaph »

ryapric wrote: post #36
adithyassekhar wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some games have Ctrl as their crouch key.

Do you know of any browser games that use Ctrl as the crouch key? That's the interface under discussion.

I don't remember if you can crouch in it or not, but a game like https://warbrokers.io could definitely have a crouch mechanic, and it would make sense for it to use ctrl.

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

#39

Post by NoZebra120vClip »

porcoda wrote: post #26
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 be…

Well, that, and the Web was created a bit before the commercialisation and privatisation of the Internet as a whole.

Since the Terms of Service of the Internet running on the National Science Foundation's backbones actually prohibited commercial activity, that put a crimp in the style of people who would try to extract money from its usage, don't you think?

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

#40

Post by phendrenad2 »

The correct solution to this problem is to allow websites to require sound. Add a HTML meta tag that tells the browser "Hey, this page won't load properly without sound, so ask the user if they want to enable sound, or navigate away". If the user really wants to load the page without sound, they can override it in about:config.

All of the other solutions are dumb and I can't believe browser vendors have settled for them.

(Could it be related to the biggest browser vendor also running their own video site that bypasses all autoplay restrictions? Nah...)

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