Type about:config with a : in the Location (address) bar. There are a choice of two Preferences you can toggle for the HTML5 player that may help.

The media.autoplay.enabled Preference will keep the HTML5 media from auto-starting in any tabs.

Or instead you can try toggling the media.block-play-until-visible Preference to true.

Thanks for this reply, but I am not looking for user level settings for my own use, I am curious about Mozilla's policy on muted autoplay in general and if they are planning to implement a similar policy like Google Chrome 66:

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-policy-changes

My eyes glazed over when reading Google's algorithm. Do we need the browser to track our previous viewing habits for every site on which we interact with media to compute a Media Engagement Index to predict when we won't be annoyed by media autoplaying?! What if we don't want our viewing tracked?

AI is the new new thing, and we'll see how many people like it when it launches in Chrome. You could search in Mozilla's bug tracking system to see whether anyone has proposed a specific implementation or started work on it:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/

Meanwhile, there are already some Firefox extensions to automatically mute new sources of audio, and let you store exceptions for sites you like. For example: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/mute-sites-by-default/

My concern is more about how ad CPMs will be affected by such a policy change. It doesnt sound like Mozilla is following suit as Chrome and Safari are making these changes.

In general, users are driving this change and it will significantly affect advertising revenue for businesses, which is why I am posing the question.

Extensions will not help us as we are using our own video player on FF sites and we are not concerned with user settings, but overall policy changes by Mozilla.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/extensions/ copy/paste stop autoplay and stop auto play Is not so much as policy as it is up to the Developers of Extensions and what the public figures they need or want. Since Mozilla is a non-profit I would think it does not matter to them, though I can not speak for them. What the people want.......

People do not mind ads so much but when you hit us with 32 tracker cookies it's like yam, using a adblocker.

Since this is not support question, I'm not going to do the research. You can search in Bugzilla if this is an important issue for you.

Greetings. As I suspected, Mozilla will be making this autoplay update

culled from : https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Roadmap

Block video auto-play: Firefox will provide users with a way to block video auto-play that doesn't break websites. (62)

Thanks for playing.

Hey, thanks for finding that. The way I read that bug, if you set

media.autoplay.enabled => false

then you can set a new preference

media.autoplay.enabled.user-gestures-needed => true

to enable custom control bar scripts to start the blocked videos (to make Vimeo work) AND to allow muted videos to play, although I couldn't test that part because... where am I going to find one?

Do you want to test it out?

(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 or accepting the risk.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste autoplay and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the media.autoplay.enabled preference to switch the value from true to false

(4) Firefox 61 (Nightly): Double-click the media.autoplay.enabled.user-gestures-needed preference to switch the value from false to true

Firefox 59 (Release) or 60 (Beta): You need to create that preference, it is hidden in these versions. Here's how:

(A) Select and copy the following preference name:

media.autoplay.enabled.user-gestures-needed

(B) Right-click a blank area of the about:config page, the click New > Boolean

(C) In the small dialog that appears, paste the new preference name and click OK

(D) In the next dialog, click true then click OK

You are ready to test -- success? (WFM on Vimeo)

Now, I'm assuming this is only visible in Nightly because it is buggy and needs more testing. But as long as you are blocking autoplay anyway, this probably would be an overall improvement. Please file bugs if you notice the feature doesn't work the way you expected.

This is not a bug, its a feature based on a policy change.

t4st33 said

This is not a bug, its a feature based on a policy change.

Oh, that's what it's called by Mozilla. Changes to Firefox, including requests for enhancement, are managed through the bug tracking system. There was a link for that feature to such a "bug." Hopefully that clarifies what I was referring to.

Anyway, as far as I can tell, this autoplay policy is a fix to reduce Firefox breaking sites when the user has disabled autoplay. As far as I can tell, it's not a policy to disable autoplay by default.

In addition to the above :

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1231886

jscher2000 said

t4st33 said

This is not a bug, its a feature based on a policy change.

Oh, that's what it's called by Mozilla. Changes to Firefox, including requests for enhancement, are managed through the bug tracking system. There was a link for that feature to such a "bug." Hopefully that clarifies what I was referring to.

Anyway, as far as I can tell, this autoplay policy is a fix to reduce Firefox breaking sites when the user has disabled autoplay. As far as I can tell, it's not a policy to disable autoplay by default.

Again it also has to do with how video ads are served to users. allowing ads to be played unmuted is highly discouraged by all browsers, so ad tech companies are trying to find ways to keep high CPMs on their ads.