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Is there a plan for the media Auto play setting to be changed to 'False' by default, in line with the recent announcement around Chrome?

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Google recently announced that as of next year, Chrome will stop auto-playing media where sound is enabled. IS there a plan to do similar with Firefox?

Google recently announced that as of next year, Chrome will stop auto-playing media where sound is enabled. IS there a plan to do similar with Firefox?

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I'm not aware of any plans along those lines.

Firefox has an optional setting you can use to disable auto-play media. It's not perfect: if a site takes its time starting the media, it bypasses the block. But if you do want to try it:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button promising to be careful.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste autop and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the media.autoplay.enabled preference to switch the value from true to false

You'll notice some strange things from time to time:

  • Media is paused, but there is a pause button. Disabling auto-play doesn't correct custom controls. To play, click pause, then click play.
  • Media is paused and there are no controls at all (for example, GIFV on Imgur). The authors of the page hid the controls. Right-click the media and click Show Controls. Then click Play.
  • You won't be able to start background music on sites where there are no controls. (Aw, shucks!)

As a footnote, Chrome's "not" autoplaying is really complicated and I don't think people are going to be delighted with it: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-policy-changes

Let's see how that works out before imitating it.