The next Firefox will block all autoplayed audio, video

No. (plus requisite dead characters)

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Between this and Chrome considering changes that would end adblocking, I might have to go back to Firefox.

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It’s like a tabloid made by people who know better than to write tabloid-level garbage, written for people who know better than to read tabloids. Snark tabloid?

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pretty much. ha.

The BB headline and story are incorrect: the next Firefox will not block “all autoplayed video,” it will block “audible autoplayed video.” Chrome and Safari have had similar constraints for over a year.

Maybe once every week or two, but the update is silent and is just applied the next time you restart with no delay I’ve noticed.

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Wow. That’s… not exactly user-friendly. But I’ve made the change. Let’s see how it works out.

Thank you!!

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The problem is that “detecting user interaction” is a moving target, and as soon as a significant portion of the user population opts out of autoplay whatever, dark-pattern Sith lords will start taking any interaction with any part of the page as “interaction” for the purposes of autoplay. There are already sites that don’t start autoplaying until you (for instance) start scrolling. All they need to do is have a listener for any user-initiated trigger and they can get around the autoplay limitation. It’s insidious.

(Bleaker sites have been doing this with popups ever since the rules for popups changed. Video will be no different.)

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Adblock. And if you complain then don’t ever expect me to come back.

You’re not entitled to run arbitrary code on my machine without my permission.

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I tried reading HuffPo once or twice, but the astonishing level of crap involved was far too much for me. I never, ever click thru to an article now. Even the BBC has autoplay vids that I immediately scramble away from (can’t tell if the articles are vids from the RSS feed). I use Pale Moon BTW.

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Oh yeah, I’ve got absurdly aggressive suite of content-blocking plugins and policies. But as came up in a recent discussion of Pi-Hole, it’s hardly a democratic response to the problem. Try telling my mom to install and manage an ad-blocker plugin.

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ABOUT TIME
applause

Well, there’s always good old fashioned hosts-file editing and proxy-level blocking. Ahh, memories.

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It’s way less slow than Chrome (at last in my experience).

Thank god, i hate the independent.co.uk web site, they just put video on every page, so they can play pre roll adds, and it take so long to load that i have already scrolled past it by the time it starts playing so i just mute the Firefox tab and close the mini player, half the time the videos are just slid-shows telling you what’s in the body, its just crappy excuse to show you a pre roll advert!

Any web site that says hay, your blocking our adverts disable your add blocker to continue, i just dont read, i am so sick of pop ups, auto play video, and aggressive adverts every other paragraph that when sites are like that, if i have gone to them threw facebook, i just mark them as spam on facebook, mobile sites are the worst for that, i need an add blocker for mobile, some sites are more adverts than content, i dont know why any one puts up with it.

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Yeah, but i’m too lazy for that now…

Can we start right here? I’m sure I’m not the only person who’d be happy to pay a small subscription to remove all the crap on BB articles.

I’m using the Brave browser which in theory will send money to the sites I frequent the most but the majority (BB included) haven’t signed up.

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So is your memory.

Thanks. Very helpful.

While there are a lot of things I’m willing to criticize Chrome for (like their asinine insistence that they use Machine Learning to algorithmically figure out which sites should be allowed to auto-play video instead of providing any user-facing controls to do so), the ad block thing is not one of them. The changes they’ve proposed for ad blockers are basically identical to Apple’s system in Safari for both iOS and macOS. Instead of extensions having live access to every page you visit and every network request you make, blockers instead have to give Safari a list of rules for what should be blocked, and then Safari does the blocking itself. I use 1Blocker for Safari on both platforms, and while it’s not 100% fool-proof – I still sometimes get pre-roll ads on Twitch, for instance – it’s still extremely effective. It’s also a lot faster than having an extension intercept every network request or run JavaScript to remove elements from the DOM, and it prevents more unscrupulous extension writers from essentially being able to MITM everything you do in the browser.

The biggest issue I can see is that Chrome’s proposed cap on how many rules an extension can supply is even lower than Safari’s (which is already too low; 1Blocker on iOS has to break its blocking lists into 7 separate rulesets to accommodate everything), and there seems to be some question surrounding how frequently an extension can refresh its ruleset. Practically speaking, this hasn’t really been an issue for me on Safari, and as long as Chrome provides the same API that Safari does for initiating a ruleset refresh without having to recompile the extension, you can still manually add any page element to the block list using a new custom rule that gets applied immediately.