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Comment by avnfish | Hacker News Reader

Caution: article features autoplaying video with audio - hitting pause or mute redirected me to a different page with the same autoplaying video

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Firefox has two settings to help with this problem. On the Plugins page, you can set the Flash plugin to "Ask to Activate." Firefox also provides a media.autoplay.enabled setting to prevent auto-playing HTML5 video and audio, although it is slightly buggy because websites expect media to autoplay[1].

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

You can also mute tabs in Firefox by clicking the little sound icon in the tab

How does that solve anything? Half the time we don't know videos are about to play, then suddenly a blast of sound comes out of the page.

What we need is a way to mute the browser by default, with selective un-muting of particular tabs once we decide we want to hear them.

An option to remember mute state for a whitelist of sites would be nice too.

I'm amazed browser vendors don't offer this. All the fancy features they build, but this one has alluded them. Auto-playing videos are the worst thing about desktop web browsing. I cannot think of a worse problem.

Good points. Here's an add-on which can mute by default https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mute-tab/

Article text: http://pastebin.com/raw/FHLMzS0a

I use the Flashcontrol extension for Chrome and found it greatly improved my browsing experience:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/flashcontrol/mfidm...

Yeah, same here. I had to right click the video and pause it that way.

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