Updated 20 March 2019
It’s been on the to-do list for a while, but Mozilla announced yesterday that with the release of Firefox 66 for desktop and Firefox for Android this week, media autoplay of video or audio is now blocked on websites by default.
According to Mozilla’s developer blog, this means that when users:
Go to a site that plays videos or audio, the Block Autoplay feature will stop the audio and video from automatically playing. If you want to view the video, simply click on the play button to watch it.
Until the user does something to initiate a video or audio stream, the only thing that will be possible is muted autoplay.
If you find it annoying when videos starting of their own accord, this will come as a welcome news. But what about use cases where it’s desirable?
Currently, it is possible to achieve autoplay blocking by toggling a setting from about:config (type that into your Firefox address bar), but that is a global setting and is either on or off.
Under the new regime, there are several options: enabling autoplay once on a website, white-listing websites to always allow autoplay from those sites, or always allow or block autoplay for all websites.
Audio conundrum
When it comes to media autoplay blocking, version 66 seems to be the number to aim for – Google implemented a similar default setting with Chrome 66 in April last year.
Apple has had default blocking since June 2017, while Microsoft offered the ability for users to turn off autoplay last summer (i.e. it’s an option rather than a default).
One thing Firefox doesn’t yet block is audio that is enabled through the JavaScript Web Audio API used by many older games and web apps.
Stated Mozilla:
We expect to ship with autoplay Web Audio content blocking enabled by default sometime in 2019.
It’s an area where browser makers have to tread carefully, as Google found out to its cost when it included Web Audio API blocking by default to Chrome 66 and was assailed with complaints about broken software.
This article was originally published on 6 February 2019
j karna
Web videos autoplay blocking would be useful as well.
Steve
I agree! And now that this article has been updated a few weeks later, we find that we got our wish.
“Updated 20 March 2019”
“It’s been on the to-do list for a while, but Mozilla announced yesterday that with the release of Firefox 66 for desktop and Firefox for Android this week, media autoplay of video or audio is now blocked on websites by default.”
Thanks, Mozilla! :)
mycelium11235
“Currently, it is possible to achieve autoplay blocking by toggling a setting from about:config (type that into your Firefox address bar), but that is a global setting and is either on or off.”
Great to mention this, but you might also want to specify what the settings are called or how to locate them (there are tons to choose from, and people probably won’t find them by scrolling). Typing “autoplay” should bring up the relevant results. Just thought it odd that this wasn’t included in the article.
roleary
Almost exactly 12 years after Rick Astley demonstrated the need for such a setting.
Paul Ducklin
…that’s a bit harsh :-) Actually, rickrolling kind of relies on click-to-play. If a video of Rick Astley appears automatically, that doesn’t count as a rickroll – to roll someone, you have to persuade them to click through. In other words, unless they expect something other than Rick, and unless Rick pops on *because of a choice they made*, it doesn’t count. That’s according to my definition, anyway…
roleary
Rick would approve. I would never diss Rick.
I’ll disagree with you on technicalities though. If somebody clicks on an obviously clickbait link and it takes them to a page with autoplaying video that totally counts. They fell for the clickbait and they were never given up.
j karna
The Daily Mail website :Autoplay video is not blocked but audio is.
anonymous
Video should not play, along with audio, unless the user clicks play. Muted video is still a waste of data bandwidth.
Asynchronousman
It has a lot more problems than autorun. They doubled the number of instances of Firefox in Task Manager from 4 to EIGHT and it doesn’t matter for at least older machines with 32 bits and only 6 GB 800 MHz RAM in this case, and when something like MSN or Yahoo fills one up with 1 GB of used memory you MUST shut down hard and start over. Why can’t FF adapt to the computer it’s installed on instead of forcing it to hang up or a tab crashes over and over?
It’s still junk in that respect but like I’m going to use IE on a Windows 7 computer that isn’t suitable for 10? You Tube is as far as I go with Google!