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Comment by musicale | Hacker News Reader

> between every paragraph is an ad and a video fixed to the top/bottom following you as you scroll and they change once the video ends

And of course Chrome, Firefox, and Safari don't provide a reliable way to stop those obnoxious auto-playing videos.

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Part of that comes down to the ad industry engineering their way around user video playback controls. I’ve heard of them even doing things like displaying video ads as sequences of static image files swapped out with JS.

This. It's not that the Firefox is ignoring your video auto-play settings, it's that it isn't video, courtesy of the industry's greed and lack of any respect for people.

I want to block anything that looks like autoplaying video.

This also brings the fastest computers to their knees because it bypasses hardware acceleration.

Yes, it was the technique but many years ago, like 2015.

I somehow managed to do it completely and flawlessly in Firefox after a day of effort and sheer hate for the fact that checking the box to keep videos from autoplaying didn't keep any videos from autoplaying. I've now forgotten how I did it and I'm afraid to change any config settings. I think I recall some diffing utility for firefox settings that I could hopefully use to figure out what I did.

It burns me up that the fact that I blocked autoplay reliably means that Firefox could do it, they just don't want to.

edit: I might have gotten the settings from a blog, but I have a strong feeling they might have been from combing the firefox bugtracker.

Firefox is supposed to block autoplay of videos that have audio unless the user has clicked to play a video on the same page. There is definitely an arms race for ads that find holes in the autoplay heuristics.

You might try setting the about:config settings “media.autoplay.default” to 5 and/or “media.autoplay.blocking_policy” to 2:

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/e24277e20c492b4a78...

If you think there is a Firefox bug, you can file a bug report and link it to this autoplay bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1376321

> Firefox is supposed to block autoplay of videos that have audio.

I want a reliable way to block autoplay of all videos, whether or not they have audio.

Readable view in Firefox is pretty reliable and builtin.

I wish it worked on more sites.

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