This announcement almost made my morning. It's frustrating seeing video everywhere when you're just trying to read an article. If I wanted video, I'd turn on my TV.

My use case is that I use FF on Android as my default web browser. If I turn off media autoplay, I'm 99% happy. However, there are a few sites that I want to autoplay. In fact, my local NPR stream refuses to play if not played via autoplay. So I'm forever toggling the autoplay setting on and off mainly so I can listen to my local NPR station.

I've been disabling autoplay in Firefox via about:config since it was available, no audio or video unless I click play. I've never run into a scenario where I've wanted or needed it to be any other way.

Is there anyone that actually likes the autoplay when watching Netflix on TV?

Update/Note: This is in the Roku app. I'm specifically talking about previews autoplaying while I scroll though different shows on the main navigation...

So you can auto-play a video, muted, and auto-play audio separately? Well that seems like a trivial work-around.

https://www.denverpost.com/2019/01/31/wade-phillips-masterfu...

If you click on the video to unmute it, you can't click again on the pause or mute icons to stop it or mute it. This behavior of ignoring your clicks happens in both Chrome and Firefox. Even clicking on Chrome's tab area with the little speaker icon doesn't mute it. To stop it, you can click on the video window's hamburger menu -- or close out the entire tab.

I don't know if it's aggressive javascript tricks or a bug in the browsers. It was the first webpage I found where Chrome's speaker icon on the page's tab couldn't mute the audio.

I'm really grateful for customizability of firefox. I discovered "media.block-play-until-visible" in about:config some time ago and I hope that they don't have plans of removing that option in the future.

It will insert a screen covering block "do not do business with XYZ" for any company who's ads autoplay.

maybe you can even get money for it if you claim you use deep learning to figure out the contents of the video ads.

Oh, and also fix the "block pop-ups" feature so that it actually blocks the obnoxious pop-ups that follow you around as you scroll (and often include annoying autoplay videos, demands to "subscribe to our newsletter," etc..)

Edit: Wait, "Muted autoplay is still allowed?" Why is it so hard to stamp out the scourge of autoplay? :(

I have a couple of HTML4 DOM-based games. Looks like I should prepare for gazillion of support requests saying that the sound stopped working in the game.

So, what should I do, rewrite everything from scratch in HTML5 and tax CPU/GPU unnecessary.

Another instance of asss ruining the technology for everyone else.

This was the case on mobile until recently (maybe a couple of years?) and the benefit to users after the change is obvious. I get the frustration but it's very much a real-world compromise with good reason. I do think that they could make this a configurable option though, much like disabling JS.

EDIT: looks like they did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19077887

There are a lot of interesting experiences that can be enabled by autoplay. If a site ends up being too annoying it will simply lose visitors, and extensions can perform more aggressive blocking for those that don't like it.

IMO this is a fine compromise solution.

    media.autoplay.allow-muted    false

    image.animation_mode    normal

I can't stand though when it autoplays trailers or previews or automatically starts something new when i've finished something i'm watching. Scrolling through netflix and having things autoplay as I scroll through is annoying as all fuck.

I can't think of a single time when I have encountered autoplay and liked it. Not even with video streamers like Netflix, YouTube, etc.

And Giphy.com to admire their logo.

What it's doing is that it's intercepting your click on the video, preventing the default click action (of pausing the video), and then manually pausing the video. I would assume this is for cross-compatibility: Some browsers would pause the video, and others wouldn't, so the script interception makes it so the video correctly pauses on all browsers.

On my computer, it plays/pauses without issue.

Most likely, you've configured your computer to disallow the prevention of the default click action, so when you click, it toggles the play/pause state to pause, and then the script toggles it again, back to play.

As for Chrome's tab area, the little speaker icon no longer mutes sites as of Chrome 70 or so. You now have to right-click on the tab and click "Mute Site", which works normally for this video.

For example there is no "display an ad" DOM API or HTML element. There are simply APIs that put text and images on the page, and you're asking the browser to figure out which are ads and block them.

There is a window.open API that can open a new window, and it has legitimate uses that you don't want to block (e.g. pop out Gmail reply to its own window).

Even "playing a video" is tricky because Web pages can play video without using the <video> element, e.g. just flipping through a list of static images, which is not blockable in practice.

So in practice the browser does have to do a lot of work to filter out unwanted behaviors.

After a bit over the top of the article played an entirely unrelated video from that site because man they wanted me to watch their video content. There was no way you could have read all the article, you were guaranteed to be interrupted.

Out of curiosity I went to an article on their site that was just a video and started that video.

After a bit over the top of that video played an entirely unrelated video from that site.... on top of the video I chose to watch.

It was just mind boggling.

    media.autoplay.allow-muted    false

Safari allows you to change the autoplay blocker to include all media, not just audible. But, for the web in general, muted autoplay is the right default.

If not, wouldn't adding one satisfy the requirement for user interaction on the page?