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Comment by helb | Hacker News Reader

You can disallow it in about:config:

    media.autoplay.allow-muted    false

…and even disable GIF animations:

    image.animation_mode    normal

…but if these became the default, people would come with arcane ways to bypass it.

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The problem with that approach is that it is all or nothing. What people want is only allowing whitelisted sites to be able to play video.

I've been using the mute sites by default extension in firefox for a while. That pretty much does what Mozilla is promising now. Works great for sound and I occasionally whitelist a website when I actually want some sound.

I'd love the same extension to be able to block video elements from playing as well. I find it highly distracting and I tend to have no patience for videos about news items.

As I understand it, that is actually not possible in Firefox. All of the extensions I've encountered that claim to be able to do that are a combination of either completely broken or merely turning off the ability to auto play video on every website without the ability to white list.

Muting sound by default is progress. Having the ability to black/whitelist sites from playing any media would be what I want. I don't need it to be default. I'm happy to do this via an add on, even. But right now there seem to be no good options for this.

On a side note, I set image.animation_mode to "once" which keeps Slack memory and CPU usage down, as the animated emojis only get one pass at my CPU.

Why once? Why not none?

So I can view tihngs like noaa once. [1] I need to walk my out-of-shape self around the parking lot and that will tell me how long I have to not get wet.

[1] - https://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/west/weus/vis-animated.gif

Oh man. Seems like the side-effect would be that you have to refresh the site to let your eyes have another pass through the animation.

Either that or it's forced you to develop a razor sharp visual memory of short weather animations. :)

One pass is usually good enough for me to know how many minutes I have before I might get soaked. :-)

The problem is most of the time I want them to not animate, but occationally I do want them to at the time of my choosing and poentially multiple times (most or all of the ones I want are explaining something that I want to learn). A play button next to the animated image with autoplay disabled would be best for me. Meanwhile "annoyance" blocklists remove some of the worst.

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