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Comment by slazaro | Hacker News Reader

WARNING: Auto-playing video with possibly loud sound.

Why sites continue to do this is beyond me.

But, fortunately, disabling auto-playing in Firefox is actually not that hard. about:config, then set "media.autoplay.enabled" to false. Done.

Thats should be the default really

Yes, but I do want YouTube and other sites to autoplay.

yepp youtube then no longer even works

there are million of front ends for youtube with better search which will work woth autoplay off. plus they show the emded version of videos that usually have less ads (because advertisers rightly deny their ads out of the main domain)

or you could just use uMatrix and whitelist sites where you want video to play

Good shout, thanks. Can you point to any good YouTube frontends? I just use MPV with sites, but I could do with good search/related functionality.

It's not quite there yet, but very close - consider qutebrowser. Work on per-domain settings is ongoing (so you can disable autoplay for everything but YouTube) and disabling autoplay is present in Qt 5.11 so hooking it up to a qutebrowser setting is probably trivial.

https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/27

https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/1643

There's also addons that let you remember a choice per site.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-autop...

That's a great idea (especially disabling preloading as well). Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to actually do anything on FF 58.

Thanks!

"do not link sites with autoplay videos" should be added to the guidelines imo.

When I encounter interesting articles on such anti-user sites, I don't bother browsing the site, I use a script to extract the article and rehost it on a public pastebin. I'd rather avoid them at all, and that wouldn't even be necessary if everyone used atom/rss feeds.

see example for this one: https://0x1a4.1337.cx/o_27/

You can blacklist bloomberg.com & co from your browser with extensions such as https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/blocksite/

Watch the ad. If you want to read the article it’s the cost of doing so. Otherwise don’t read it.

Nope. Their revenue model isn't my problem. uBlock Origin enabled for 99.9% of sites I visit.

By doing so I'm basically using a browser unable to render their ads or be in tracked by their advertisers, I don't see anything wrong with that.

I'd understand if they ask not to rehost their content tho.

My complaint with this article isn't about watching the ad or not, its that it autoplays with sound. For example, I didn't see the warning and I played it in work. Luckily nobody heard it because I closed it quickly enough, but, still, auto play is not ok.

For chrome I have JS disabled on Bloomberg and that seems to do the trick to stop the autoplaying and not disrupting the article content.

Off-topic, but Firefox offers the option to turn off auto-play. My go-to for news browsing.

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