Ask HN: How do I reliably prevent autoplay in Firefox 91? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do I reliably prevent autoplay in Firefox 91?

49 pointsnanis26 comments

I would like no video or audio to play unless I click on it. After this morning's upgrade to version 91, I am back to videos on Twitter (and possibly elsewhere) starting to auto-play just by scrolling into view. In my preferences, I have "Block Audio and Video" for all sites with no exceptions. In my Twitter profile, I have "Autoplay" set to "Never", but, I also look at threads without logging in.

Do you know what I need to do to be able to look at a Twitter thread while not logged in without triggering autoplay? Unfortunately, I do not remember what I had done previously which made it so that I almost never encountered autoplaying media on any site.

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The solution I use is to set media.autoplay.blocking_policy to 2 in about:config (I found this on the Mozilla wiki [1]). This setting requires a click to play media.

Incidentally, I browse Twitter while logged in, but the autoplay settings are "per-browser", and Firefox's anti-fingerprinting mode makes Twitter think you're using a new browser on each visit, and thus keeps autoplaying all the time without the above setting. Pretty irritating.

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Media/block-autoplay

> The solution I use is to set media.autoplay.blocking_policy to 2 in about:config (I found this on the Mozilla wiki [1]). This setting requires a click to play media.

Not really. The mozilla wiki says:

>The technical detail for this policy is that the play invocation should be triggered inside an user input event handler.

If the autoplay is what OP described (ie. "starting to auto-play just by scrolling into view"), then that would satisfy the condition because it's within an user input event handler (the scroll).

Right, and as the wiki mentions, it's not a great solution overall. But at least it works for me for Twitter (and Twitter is still trying to autoplay on scroll, the play button on videos disappear while scrolling only to reappear). Not sure why it works actually, but it's better than going in the Twitter settings all the time or dealing with autoplay.

From the wiki:

> For example, when a user clicks the element X, then we only allow a website to start the element X from a function that is in the call stack based on the X's “click” event handler.

I could be misinterpreting this, but doesn't that imply that scrolling into view would generally not be sufficient to allow autoplay? Since the scroll event would be on the body/window, and the video itself is not the target of the event?

My interpretation there is that you can start video playback within a click handler or one of its callees, but there's no check on where the video element is. The latter check would be impossible to implement because <video> elements can't have child elements (eg. for playback buttons) so adding that restriction would break custom playback buttons.

Some additional non-default settings I have which work very well so far:

media.autoplay.default = 5

media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground = false

Of course, if you're using Android, about:config isn't an option unless you use nightly.

Curiosly, I just checked and I have:

* media.autoplay.default = 5

* media.autoplay.enabled = false

in my about:config but media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground was left at its default "true" value, so I changed that.

I am going to post this and restart the browser to see if that did the trick.

*Update*: No, it didn't. sigh

I found this: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1274056

> media.autoplay.allow-extension-background-pages false

> media.autoplay.block-event.enabled true

> media.autoplay.block-webaudio true

> media.autoplay.default 5

> media.autoplay.enabled.user-gestures-needed false

There is also this https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/h0rsd9/could_someo...

> media.autoplay.blocking_policy = 2

seems to correspond to the media.autoplay.enabled.user-gestures-needed setting above. Will try those next.

*Last Update*: I have set:

    media.autoplay.allow-extension-background-pages = false
    media.autoplay.block-event.enabled = true
    media.autoplay.block-webaudio = true
    media.autoplay.default = 5
    media.autoplay.blocking_policy = 2

Thank you very much.

and that finally seems to have restored the behavior I want.

Bravo! And thanks for the meticulous follow-up.

Edit: my config is approximately the same, so I apologise for not specifying them more thoroughly. Doing so with one finger and no copy/paste is onerous.

Any adverse effects of this config? Thanks for detailing.

The only thing resembling adverse that I've noticed is:

1. Youtube requires two taps to activate video

2. Some news media videos, eg CNN, do not play. *This may result from adblocking; not sure and not motivated to pursue it.

Thanks, I've only noticed some non YT web videos won't play, but generally great.

Autoplay is toxic. I think all webpages should be completely static by default. By law.

Hey, just use a browser that supports (x)html 4.1 and you're golden, no laws needed!

Chrome doesn't, apparently.

It sure would be interesting to see how much green house gasses and similar are emitted as a direct result of autoplay. It takes computing power and bandwidth and electricity. Much more than text and images. Autoplay is anti-environment, if you really think about it.

If you added up all of the electricity consumed from start to end for autoplay for all people who encounter it, and compare it to bitcoin mining, what do you think consumes more electricity globally? I don't factually know, but I have a guess.

Don't get me started on flashing ads. They give me headaches. I wonder if they can induce an epileptic fit, i understand fast, flashing lights can do that.

Why ever the fuck anyone would want autoplay, especially of unsolicited random content, must simply be... They actually don't! Which begs the inquiry of why it is so ruthlessly, relentlessly foisted on us. The answers are, to me, obvious, but apparently not to be uttered above one's breath. I'll do it anyway:

Browser (noun) - advertisement/surveillance platforms, some of which can be modified (by some) to exhibit secondary browsing capabilities.

You might be interested in the alternative Twitter front-end Nitter[0] which does not autoplay videos. There's even extensions for Firefox etc. and you could run your own instance if you so chose.

[0]https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

Thank you. Good idea. I will look into it.

It's frustrating how sites just ignore or circumvent this setting. Some sites just pretend this option doesn't exist and their video player breaks. This setting helps a little but never worked 100% for me. On YouTube I always open a video in a new tab. For some reason that prevents autoplay.

It would be pretty nice to have a setting that not only reliably blocks autoplay of videos but also animated gifs. Most of the time they're just distracting.

I missed using FlashBlock (Firebird extension) back when Shockwave/Flash is popular. FlashBlock did what it said and block all Flash video in the page until I click the element to load that Flash object and it will play the video. Back then, there is no escaping with this extension, it is relentless and very good at it.

Now, browsers bastardized the version of FlashBlock and implemented this shitty approach with HTML5 autoplay which sometime work but never did in the same level as FlashBlock. We need HTML5Block extension (there are one extension but it is no longer maintained) that can do the same level as FlashBlock.

In my preferences, I have "Block Audio and Video" for all sites with no exceptions

If the browser can't control whether the video player plays or pauses then that option should prevent the browser from loading the player module at all until the user clicks on it. Unfortunately broken player windows would make things look slightly less polished, and if there's anything consistent about Firefox it's their willingness to look good even if it means bending over their power users.

This is why I miss Flash: by not installing it I didn’t have to deal with blasting audio, video, or sites that required a stupid journey or game in order to simply use them.

On Chromium-based browsers I use an extension called AutoplayStopper [1] which works well for me. It allows you to add exceptions for certain sites too which is helpful.

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autoplaystopper/ej...

I'm using the Video Autoplay Blocker for Firefox. It stops videos from playing until you click their "Watch Video" button on the top left corner of the video.

Why is it that no popular browser seems to have a simple, built-in "block autoplay" setting that actually works?

Firefox - no

Safari - no

Chrome - no

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