Firefox Will Soon Start Automatically Muting Auto-Playing Audio and Video

One of the most annoying parts of the web is auto-playing videos and ads. Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and other browsers introduced new mechanisms over the last year that automatically blocks out these auto-playing media, and Firefox is finally joining in.

Starting with Firefox 66, the browser will automatically start blocking automatically playing audio and video. There is a slight annoyance, however — instead of completely blocking the playback, Firefox will simply mute whatever is auto-playing audio. This means if a site has auto-playing video, it will still eat up your data, which could be problematic if you are on a limited data plan or using mobile hotspot.

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Firefox will also let users manually allow auto-playing sound on certain sites if they want to.

The company has outlined the technical details about the feature for web developers here. It plans to start rolling out the feature with Firefox 66 on March 19 across all platforms.

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Conversation 12 comments

  • dontbe evil

    05 February, 2019 - 5:17 am

    <p>I'm gladly using this feature on Edge for motnhs</p>

  • wright_is

    Premium Member
    05 February, 2019 - 5:49 am

    <p>Interesting, it just goes to show how many sites I visit that autoplay video… None, apart from YouTube and even then it doesn't start playing the video until the tab is visible.</p><p><br></p>

  • Patrick3D

    05 February, 2019 - 10:10 am

    <p>Too bad these built-in blockers don't work against HTML5 embedded videos. Go to any news story on CNN for example that has an embedded video and it will start playing automatically.</p>

  • waethorn

    05 February, 2019 - 11:16 am

    <p>I wish they could just ban autoplaying video. Period.</p><p><br></p><p>Some of the crappy video players embedded on websites just choke a browser, what with all the Javascript being used in them, along with the rest of the crap JS trackers and other garbage bullsh*t.</p>

    • dontbe evil

      05 February, 2019 - 12:50 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#402800">In reply to Waethorn:</a></em></blockquote><p>me too … but I solved with Edge</p>

  • ben55124

    Premium Member
    05 February, 2019 - 12:55 pm

    <p>Sites will just find a way around it. I would like a browser option to have tabs muted by default – force me to click to unmute.</p><p><br></p><p>For home I don't care, but office I would default to muted.</p>

  • hrlngrv

    Premium Member
    05 February, 2019 - 2:09 pm

    <p>Not all that big a deal. I've been using extensions to mute tabs automatically and block autoplay video. As long as there are extensions which provide such functionality, does it need to be built into the browser?</p>

  • ashish4125

    06 February, 2019 - 5:42 am

    <p>Nice artical <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">gladly using this feature</span> <span style="background-color: rgb(245, 245, 245); color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">I wish they could just ban autoplaying video. </span><a href="https://www.abstarnews.com&quot; target="_blank" style="background-color: rgb(245, 245, 245); color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Period.</a></p>

  • Hoomgar

    06 February, 2019 - 2:11 pm

    <p>All I have to say is it's about time.&nbsp; Why so long to get to this?</p>

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