Is there a plan for the media Auto play setting to be changed to 'False' by default, in line with the recent announcement around Chrome?
Google recently announced that as of next year, Chrome will stop auto-playing media where sound is enabled. IS there a plan to do similar with Firefox?
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I'm not aware of any plans along those lines.
Firefox has an optional setting you can use to disable auto-play media. It's not perfect: if a site takes its time starting the media, it bypasses the block. But if you do want to try it:
(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button promising to be careful.
(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste autop and pause while the list is filtered
(3) Double-click the media.autoplay.enabled preference to switch the value from true to false
You'll notice some strange things from time to time:
- Media is paused, but there is a pause button. Disabling auto-play doesn't correct custom controls. To play, click pause, then click play.
- Media is paused and there are no controls at all (for example, GIFV on Imgur). The authors of the page hid the controls. Right-click the media and click Show Controls. Then click Play.
- You won't be able to start background music on sites where there are no controls. (Aw, shucks!)
As a footnote, Chrome's "not" autoplaying is really complicated and I don't think people are going to be delighted with it: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-policy-changes
Let's see how that works out before imitating it.