Firefox Blocks Autoplaying Web Audio (engadget.com) 121
Mozilla's latest Nightly builds for Firefox now include an option to mute autoplaying audio. The feature was recently added to the Chrome browser, but Mozilla's update offers a few more options. According to Engadget, "You can turn the feature off entirely, force it to ask for permission, and make exceptions for specific sites." Keep in mind that these are nightly releases, so you will most likely run into some bugs. The "polished version" is likely weeks away.
Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Can we go back to the days where images and fonts weren't automatically downloaded? What about asking to accept every time a cookie is requested?
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You are trying to make an equivalency argument where there is none.
A cookie, or image or font is not really in your face. It does not really fire a giant sequence of events from the visual lobes at the back of our brain using our resources (10% of our bodies energy) to operate.
There is a reason we get so much more upset over rich media advertisements trying to get our attention, our annoyance is biologically based, we are attempting to conserve energy for our function and survival. Advertisers love to mak
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So please put down your straw man and politely back away from the conversation before we realize that your a media shill and we decide to eat your face off.
WTF?
I'd genuinely like to go back to having websites not download custom fonts, not download tons of images, not run scripts, not expect cookies (let alone third party cookies), etc. but still work and function as a proper website. I'll whitelist what I want.
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What about asking to accept every time a cookie is requested?
That's a feature I really miss. Obviously, there must be an option "always {accept,reject,session} for domain spying.tripleclick.com".
Somehow, extensions fare really poorly here.
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Please don't go back to the days without images. I avoid ads by disabling pictures and if everybody starting doing it, they would find a way around it.
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Good ol' Ad Words. Oh, what's this relevant link in the article I'm reading? Better mouse over it and... sfgsj;gsa;;dglhasldg
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You can do those today. Use a text web browser like Lynx! :P
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What about asking to accept every time a cookie is requested?
What do you mean back to the days? Europeans would love to know!
Jokes about the stupidity of EU legislation that forced the "we use cookies" popup on every site, there's no going forward or going back. Ther's only understanding the change in context of the world and why we did things the way we did.
1) Asking about cookies made sense back in a time when their use was rare. Now it makes more sense to block 3rd party cookies, and often erase them after the session completes.
2) Blocking images made sense when t
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I do use it. I didn't know I could block fonts with it.
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You seem to think my previous post was ironic. I was being genuine.
I'd prefer the web to work without all that shit, and the expectation to be that I have to whitelist your shit if you want me to see it.
Good luck blocking all autoplay (Score:2)
Browsers allow a muted VP8, VP9, or AVC file to autoplay because allowing it takes less Internet bandwidth than falling back to animated GIF, a sequence of discrete JPEG files, or a JPEG filmstrip animated with CSS sprites [pineight.com].
If you plan to build an extension to block all autoplay, here are some test cases [pineight.com]. Good luck getting them all.
Re:Good luck blocking all autoplay (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't want it to fall back to anything. I want it to put a big blank rectangle, with a standardized play button in the center, that does not begin downloading anything until I click on the play button. Webpages do not need to be the multi-megabyte javascript monstrosities that they currently are.
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I want it to put a big blank rectangle, with a standardized play button in the center, that does not begin downloading anything until I click on the play button.
I can see how the browser would recognize VP8, VP9, AVC, GIF, or APNG cases to transform them into a play button. But how would the browser recognize the sequence and filmstrip methods before they start moving?
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I don't know how it works, but HTML5 autoplayblocker for Chrome works pretty well. Maybe it's best left as an extension, though?
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Sequence and filmstrip methods use the same <img> markup as a static photo. How would the browser distinguish <img> markup that represents a static JPEG, PNG, or still GIF from <img> markup that represents an animated GIF, a container for an image sequence, or a filmstrip?
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Easy, you only render the first frame and that's it. There were options to not play animated GIFs since browsers were first released, so all Firefox and other browsers need to do is simply modify the image renderer to only draw out the first frame. They
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Let me know if I understand your recommendation correctly. Unless and until the user has clicked the play button for a particular document, the browser should:
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This discussion is about tools to block video from playing automatically. My hypothesis is that if a website's script notices that the browser is blocking HTML5 video from playing, the script will replace the HTML5 video with a different way of presenting video that isn't blocked.
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So where did you get animated GIFs and shit from?
The website's script will notice that the web browser has converted the video to "a big blank rectangle, with a standardized play button in the center", remove this "big blank rectangle, with a standardized play button in the center" from the DOM, and replace it with something that the browser doesn't recognize as video. How should I have phrased it differently to get that across?
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Please see my reply to Anonymous Coward who suggested the same thing [slashdot.org].
Autoplay is not a feature you can just disable (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of people say "why haven't browsers just turned off autoplay" as if "autoplay" is a browser feature you can just turn off without affecting anything else. Unfortunately, it is not.
As a matter of fact there is an HTML5 "autoplay" feature, but it's hardly ever used. The "autoplaying" audio and video you experience is mostly scripts loading a video and calling "play()". Unfortunately, in the browser, there's no straightforward way to distinguish that from legitimate uses, e.g. a game playing a sound triggered by some event. It's even more difficult for non-audio cases, because Web developers can *and do* create "autoplaying" videos even without using script, e.g. using animated GIFs or sequences of PNG images selected by CSS. Those are much worse for users in every way than letting the site play video in a proper format.
So, browsers mostly aren't trying to block autoplaying silent video, and have to come up with heuristics to block autoplaying audio. There are tradeoffs because false positives are bad; e.g. making it hard for games to play sounds is a problem. It's easy for autoplay detection heuristics to break legitimate Web sites and cause users --- maybe not you, but other users --- to get upset, and Web developers too.
In short, this is a very hard problem, there are no perfect solutions, and the solutions being deployed now are the result of a lot of work over quite a long period of time.
In theory, the game could be a native app (Score:2)
Unfortunately, in the browser, there's no straightforward way to distinguish that from legitimate uses, e.g. a game playing a sound triggered by some event.
Staunch anti-JavaScript advocates would point out that if a game wants to play a sound, the developer of the game can distribute the game as a separate executable that the user can choose to download to his or her computer and launch there. Some would go as far as to encourage the developer to distribute the game in source code form that the user can inspect and compile.
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Staunch anti-Javascript advocates are welcome to run NoScript, block all scripts, and not play any Web games.
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Web games are basically dead now, anyway. Sites like kongregate only work on niche browsers like IE and Firefox.
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How do you expect the page to render then at all? The pixels will have to change from white to the page body background color. At what point do you expect it to render or not, because every resource linked by the website itself can and will cause a render?
Hint: if you really want that much control over rendering, don't use an image/video rendering browser: use a text only browser like links.
Three paints should be enough (Score:2)
At what point do you expect it to render or not, because every resource linked by the website itself can and will cause a render?
Assume that a viewer is seeking to avoid animation as an accommodation for a sensory processing issue. For such a viewer, three paints should be enough, one after the document reaches each of these states:
Finally (Score:2)
...yet.. (Score:1, Troll)
No one cares because FireFox is dead.
They killed the addon ecosystem for "major speed improvements" that could only top Chrome in 2 benchmarks.
Such a waste of potential.
Re:...yet.. (Score:5, Interesting)
>"No one cares because FireFox is dead. They killed the addon ecosystem for "major speed improvements" that could only top Chrome in 2 benchmarks."
Don't feel the troll.....
The ecosystem they "killed" actually bounced back quite quickly. I use a lot of strange addons, and nearly every one was available immediately or just a few months after the switchover.
And Firefox is, by most measurements, just as fast, overall, as Chrome is NOW. And yet is more driven by the community, cares about privacy more, and is not a closed binary. Plus, I trust Mozilla a lot more than Google, who has their hands in everyone's business.
I am far more annoyed by the "Chromification" of Firefox, but that is not new, and is still far less Chromey than Chrome.
Bug 1325692 still blocks Keybinder (Score:5, Informative)
I use a lot of strange addons, and nearly every one was available immediately or just a few months after the switchover.
That's a big "nearly". There's no counterpart to Keybinder [github.com] for Firefox 57 and later, and there won't be until bug 1325692 [mozilla.org] is fixed.
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>"That's a big "nearly". There's no counterpart to Keybinder [github.com] for Firefox 57 and later, and there won't be until bug 1325692 [mozilla.org] is fixed."
The "nearly" will vary greatly from user to user, of course. You are absolutely correct that there are some addons that are waiting for bug fixes, and others waiting for a suitable API to be released. The latter is a shame, I think perhaps they rushed too quickly into this without giving enough API hooks and support. Still, the "average" user,
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Reply to self; My numbers added to 8 instead of 7 :) Sorry, can't edit posts, dern it.
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No they're not, no they don't, and yes, it would be if it were true.
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That's a big "nearly"
It's a small nearly. There are 14,862 users [mozilla.org] of Keybinder. Why should all the other improvements be delayed for one feature used by a small number of people?
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Because right now, an accidental press of Ctrl+Q when reaching for Ctrl+Tab causes data loss in those forms that "Restore Previous Session" cannot recover, such as Slashdot D2 comment forms.
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If this deeply matters to you then you should get involved with the bug you mentioned and help implement it. Why don't you do that? It's a nice, targeted project with a clear beginning and end.
Re: (Score:2)
It works on Windows and macOS. It doesn't work on Linux.
Is it recommended to run Firefox for Windows in Wine on Linux?
If this deeply matters to you then you should get involved with the bug you mentioned and help implement it. Why don't you do that?
Reason 1 of 3: Switching from Firefox ESR 52 doesn't matter enough to me to devote 30 GB of drive space on my primary PC (source [mozilla.org]).
Reason 2 of 3: My primary PC is already maxed out at 4 GB of RAM, one 2 GB stick in each of its 2 slots, and switching from Firefox ESR 52 doesn't matter enough to me to sit through hours of thrashing swap.
Reason 3 of 3: Switching from Firefox ESR 52 doesn't matter enough to me to quit my day job to free up enough time
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Being proactive is cost prohibitive for many.
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Finding one example in an entire ecosystem isn't a "big" anything. I hope your killer addon gets ported successfully, I really do, but to use that as an example that the majority of the ecosystem didn't bounce back doesn't make a lot of sense, especially given that by all accounts it wasn't a very popular plugin.
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The "bounce back" was for useless stuff that provides little to no value, much like Chrome's addons. No SQLite manager, no FTP, no SSH, no TableTools, no "advanced" right click, etc. It was just the gimmicky garbage that was left behind in the aftermath because addon developers no longer have the access they need to create useful tools. WebExtensions are woefully inadequate compared to XUL.
Firefox is slower than Chrome https://venturebeat.com/2018/0... [venturebeat.com] only coming ahead in Kraken/WebXPRT.
And that "privac
Re:...yet.. (Score:4, Informative)
>"The "bounce back" was for useless stuff that provides little to no value,"
Yeah, like Adblock, Ublock Origin, HTML5 block, Nuke Anything, NoScript. Give me a break. There are TONS of useful and valuable addons. The ones that suffered the most were the ones tweaking the UI (a few I do miss) and hopefully that will recover too, once additional API's are released.
>"Firefox is slower than Chrome only coming ahead in Kraken/WebXPRT."
When I look at many different benchmarks from different people, what *I* see is a mixture of wins and loses, and mostly very narrow margins. For NORMAL, REAL-WORLD browsing, most users will notice no speed difference between current Firefox and current Chrome. It is like worrying about a car that can go 0-60 in 6 seconds and one that goes 0-60 in 5.75 seconds.... really doesn't matter that much.
>"And that "privacy" you so love - is non-existent. They just backdoor it through "experiments" which are exempt from their privacy policy and supposedly have privacy polices of their own, but in reality it's whatever data they want to harvest, they can, and will - with no oversight."
As far as I am aware, all those "experiments" in Firefox have a simple "OFF" setting in the preferences and/or in about:config. And without nags, and without reverting back on after updates. Meanwhile, Chrome is a Google mystery binary that does anything it wants - with no oversight AND no ability to look at the code. Google does seem to care about security at least as much as Mozilla. But privacy? Mozilla has taken that lead many times.
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That's fair about adblock/etc - except I can get those on any platform. The value the others were providing was that they were available nowhere else. Additional APIs could be added later, but take web sockets - Mozilla's official response is "it's too complicated".
> It is like worrying about a car that can go 0-60 in 6 seconds and one that goes 0-60 in 5.75 seconds.... really doesn't matter that much.
That's my point - the benefits XUL provided in terms of UI/UX enhancements far outweighed the minimal
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That's fair about adblock/etc - except I can get those on any platform.
But on which platform do they work best? It's worth reading what the author of uBlock Origin (gorhill) has to say about it [mozillazine.org].
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Tit-for-tat all you want fact is, users have spoken. Firefox is on course to drop below 5% usage while Chrome is on course to top 60%.
Re:...yet.. (Score:4, Informative)
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>"fact is, users have spoken. Firefox is on course to drop below 5% usage while Chrome is on course to top 60%."
Which is 100% only because Google plays "unfair" and pushed Chrome on people with non-stop harassment from their sites and services. Not conjecture; fact. I saw and experienced it. That isn't "users have spoken", it is "users took an easy path resistance" What is proves is that advertisement works. It has little to do with browser merits and everything to do with marketing- something Goo
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Firefox is slower than Chrome
You should review those benchmarks. In the Firefox versus Chrome comparison, Firefox beats Chrome 5 times out of 9. It's also interesting to note that Firefox is never last in any of the benchmarks, whereas Chrome is last 4 times and Edge is last 5 times.
So I would say what you've demonstrated is that Firefox is the best browser in practical terms. Firefox delivers the best performance over a wide range of benchmarks.
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>"Two of my favorite extensions are impossible in 57+ :( Classic Theme Restorer and Tab Mix Plus."
Yep, first thing I wanted was "classic theme restorer" because I HATE tabs on top. Really, that is the only reason I want/need it. There is a workaround, however, by having a custom userChrome.css
https://support.mozilla.org/en... [mozilla.org]
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My mom is fighting cancer you insensitive fuck
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Other browser brands are ads.
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uBlock Origin works just fine in Chrome
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could only top Chrome in 2 benchmarks
It's more than 2 in practice. Here's a real world benchmark [pspdfkit.com].
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https://venturebeat.com/2018/0... [venturebeat.com]
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So Firefox beats Chrome in synthetic benchmarks as well as in real world benchmarks. You're right, Firefox is plainly the better choice.
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Re:...yet.. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you'll find the decline started well before that, back when they ousted THE GUY WHO INVENTED JAVASCRIPT over some stupid SJW non-issue.
No autoplay, period. (Score:5, Insightful)
Muting audio is not enough. It shouldn't play video AT ALL. Video and animation, audible or not, is still extremely irritating, distracting, and consumes copious amount of bandwidth and CPU, and thus power and battery. And all that slows further rendering and makes using slower/older machines that much more painful. And on multiuser systems, it affects other people and processes, too (yes, I know that is rare nowadays, but I deal with it all the time on big systems, and remote viewing and remote X sessions).
If you want something MUCH better and RIGHT NOW, see this addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... [mozilla.org]
It hasn't been updated recently, and has some flaws, but it beats the hell out of anything else I can come up with right now. Works well most of the time.
I really wish we could stop all the annoying animation and scrolling/fading/creeping crap on sites, too. And no, disabling javascript is no longer an option.
Re:No autoplay, period. (Score:4, Insightful)
And no, disabling javascript is no longer an option.
If you don't disable JavaScript, sites will use a setInterval to load each frame of the video as a JPEG and display it, as in this demo [pineight.com].
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If you don't disable JavaScript, sites will use a setInterval to load each frame of the video as a JPEG and display it, as in this demo [pineight.com].
Honestly given the choice between breaking nearly every webpage on the internet without manual intervention, and having a soundless animation display I'll pick the latter any day of the week.
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"Honestly given the choice between breaking nearly every webpage on the internet without manual intervention, and having a soundless animation display I'll pick the latter any day of the week."
Honestly given the choice between breaking nearly every webpage on the internet without manual intervention, and having a soundless animation display I'll pick the former any day of the week.
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You do you man, you do you.
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Damn, now I'm a Portlandia character. I don't even live in Portland any more!
media.autoplay.enabled not very effective (Score:2)
I just tried your suggestion in Firefox ESR 52 on Debian 9, with media.autoplay.enabled changed to false. Though the preference successfully blocked VP8, VP9, and AVC video from autoplaying, several methods of presenting video managed to sneak past it: GIF [pineight.com], JPEG sequence [pineight.com], PNG sequence [pineight.com], JPEG filmstrip [pineight.com], and PNG filmstrip [pineight.com].
CSS Sprite Sheet Animations with steps() (Score:2)
The "JPEG filmstrip" and "PNG filmstrip" methods are based on "CSS Sprite Sheet Animations with steps()" by Guil Hernandez [teamtreehouse.com].
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>"I just tried your suggestion in Firefox ESR 52 on Debian 9, with media.autoplay.enabled changed to false. Though the preference successfully blocked VP8, VP9, and AVC video from autoplaying, several methods of presenting video managed to sneak past it: GIF [pineight.com], JPEG sequence [pineight.com], PNG sequence [pineight.com], JPEG filmstrip [pineight.com], and PNG filmstrip [pineight.com]."
Well, like I said, it isn't perfect. GIF animation/video can be blocked already, just set image.animation_mod
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>"Well, like I said, it isn't perfect. GIF animation/video can be blocked already, just set image.animation_mode;none in about:config"
P.S. that setting will also stop the playing of animated PNG (APNG) files. However, it will not stop javascript programs that create a sequenced display of numerous, static PNG or JPEG images.
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Fortunately, the manual sequence "pseudo-video" stuff you listed isn't used much out there.
Yet. Once Flash blocking became commonplace, advertisers switched to autoplaying HTML5 video. Once it becomes common to block HTML5 video, advertisers are likely to embrace these fallback methods.
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>"Yet. Once Flash blocking became commonplace, advertisers switched to autoplaying HTML5 video. Once it becomes common to block HTML5 video, advertisers are likely to embrace these fallback methods."
Unfortunately, you might be right. This is why I keep saying that browsers need to be smarter and need tools to start trapping and throttling javascript tight loops, CPU usage, image flipping, etc. Seems like we have almost no control at all right now.
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>"about:config media.autoplay.enabled;false Not hard."
That option is not reliable and breaks LOTS of sites, where it then becomes impossible to play anything you do want. Plus it also has no method of dealing with site preferences. This is why I suggested the addon and ignored media.autoplay.enabled. Believe me, I have spent MANY hours testing both. Mozilla has several major bug reports about media.autoplay.enabled and they seem unable or unwilling to fix it, but we shall see.
For now, the addon wo
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>"audio and video shouldn't just NOT autoplay... they shouldn't even start to load. except, perhaps, a thumbnail image for videos (from the actual video and not some bullshit cover image bait like yt has so much of). when they buffer anyway, they still slow down your net, chew up precious data, and bog down the browser."
Good point. But the addon I suggested also has optional settings to disable the preloading/buffering, too :) And it has site-by-site, remembered preferences. I would love to see someth
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This.
Every time I open Firefox and restore my previous session I have to hunt through all my windows and pause every YouTube video that auto-plays when I'm bombarded by a wall of noise.
At least they don't background-load tabs when restoring any more. That's something.
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I've had the following two settings set in Firefox ever since I discovered them and I never get autoplaying media:
media.autoplay.enabled = false
media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground = true
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>"I've had the following two settings set in Firefox ever since I discovered them and I never get autoplaying media:"
And I tried those on and off for many months and discovered that although they stop just as much autoplay as the addon does, they also blocked many sites from EVER working with ANY media. One good example (among many I discovered) was Spotify, which became unusable.... not the case with the addon. And no, I didn't keep a list of the dozens of other important places that stopped working b
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Oh yeh, totally true. I find I get more benefit from no media though than the occasional annoyance of a few broken sites. Vimeo is another one that had a huge bug report from years ago they showed no sign of fixing.
I tend to just fire up Chrome if I need to play something like that.
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Advertising companies need to stop screwing-up the internet like they did TV.
Stop shoving demeaning, insulting crap at us!
I hate to say it, yet we really do need regulation in this country/global economy.
And, if your site requires me to disable my ad blockers, then I don't need to visit your site.
I have, and sometimes do, click on simple ad links, yet totally react against popup, auto-start anything.
Mouse-overs suck, too. It is perfectly fine to allow me to cli
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>"about:config, search for "autoplay" and set to "false". Done."
As I have pointed out in other posts, that option:
1) Is not reliable
2) Is not site-specific/configurable
3) Has no UI controls
4) Breaks many sites in a way that makes it impossible to play ANY media on them
That is why I suggest the addon. Try it, just make sure to set the about:config option back to the default first.
Video pop-outs? (Score:4, Funny)
What's the easiest way to block the auto pop-out of videos when you scroll down? Whoever came up with that needs to be drug out back...
"Hey, I want this annoying video at the top of the page to follow me when I scroll past it and block the text I came here to read." - said no one ever.
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>"What's the easiest way to block the auto pop-out of videos when you scroll down? Whoever came up with that needs to be drug out back..."
Oh, indeed. It is like, "Let's do the most annoying thing we can think of to users- autoplay video"! "Oh drat, that is not annoying ENOUGH, so let's make it FOLLOW the user down the page!" What a great idea! Next up, autoplaying video AS A BACKGROUND?
This is as close as I can get to effectively dealing with it right now...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... [mozilla.org]
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Well maybe, or it could be thst the developers ofc have fast hw, and th tesrvsuites (if any are used at all) make asunmtions aboutaverage user hw and/or sw (even connecton bandwith and latency) if you fall below these you are unfurtunstle most lightly out of luck. Are these avarage values set correctly, that I don’t know. This was a rather long winded way of saying, the web devs migt not intentionaly meke thimgs heavier then needed but unfortunatly the end yup being that way anyway.
Well that was my $
Why is this still an issue? (Score:2)
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Firefox has such a setting, at least, in the ESR versions. You can open up about:config and set "media.autoplay.enabled" to false to stop autoplaying any media. You can also set the readahead limit on how much of the media data is downloaded into cache before playing. It's very handy for metered internet connections. Figures that Mozilla fucked that up in the newer versions, and now they have to go back an do a half-ass job of re-implementing what they already had perfect in the old versions.
I'm not looking
Tabs On Bottom? (Score:1)
Call me Mr Underwhelmed. Let me know when the arrogant wankers put back the option for Tabs on Bottom...
Amateurism (Score:2)
I'm amazed at the amateurism with with browser companies pick up this sort of stuff.
Today it is sounds (but not fonts). /not/ fully capture all, and make the default wrong. And they did so after this issie had been reported what, /decades/ earlier?
Yesterday it was videos (but not sounds).
Somewhere along the line it was pages hijacking browser shortcuts. And browser companies even going so far as to
Maximising the browser window, in the past. Pop-ups. The list goes on and on.
Everything gets fucking approa
Put a mute button on your mouse (Score:2)
I've had a button on my mouse mapped to "mute" for many years now, and I think it's the single beat customization that can be done. If you just opened a link, odds are your hand is on the mouse, as soon as you hear anything it's muted in a tiny fraction of a second. It works particularly well to avoid hearing Youtube ads.
Unfortunatley I haven't found anything as fast for mobile yet.