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Comment by tomComb | Hacker News Reader

I agree that that is the crux of the matter, but I'm not sure that the two sides are irreconcilable.

Google and site owners want to do targeted ads. I'm not sure that users hate targeted ads specifically. I, for one, am not a site owner myself, but I'm sympathetic enough to their need for revenue that I'm OK with targeted ads.

I hate stuff like auto-play video (and am thrilled that Firefox has well and truly conquered that issue) and I'm pissed that many companies sell or leak my data but I'm not looking to reject targeted ads outright.

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> Firefox has well and truly conquered that issue

Don't worry, advertisers will catch up soon, and just bundle ads with JS-based H.264 decoder that renders to <canvas>.

YouTube autoplays just fine in firefox. What did you mean?

And that's exactly the problem.. it used to be very hard to block just a few weeks ago.

Sorry, what do you mean? How can I block autoplaying yt vids in firefox?

I use "Enhacer for Youtube" extension.

Yes, these kind of extensions just used to take advantage of the existing properties.

You could get to it through about:config (so.. a little difficult for the common user to reach)

media.autoplay.enabled

media.autoplay.allow-muted

They then changed to

media.autoplay.default

media.autoplay.block-webaudio

media.autoplay.enabled.user-gestures-needed

And removed the previous parameters, which caused the videos to start playing automatically again, until you would configure the new properties (again, only though about:config).

Finally, they're now providing a menu option for achieving the same, which deserves to be applauded.

Yes, I have allowed autoplay on the video sites, but it is now click-to-enable on all those others sites that are just using it for ads.

Go to about:config in Firefox, and change "media.autoplay.allow-muted" to false.

Chrome has shut down auto-play on any video with sound (excepting video specific sites) and they have a flag "Autoplay policy" which was partially successful, but not as effective as the blocking in Firefox.

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