Firefox v66 begins to intercept automatically playing audible video and audio
Firefox is also ready to follow up after Google Chrome has started playing autoplay. Firefox said that auto-playing audio and video is very disruptive to users. Firefox said that the main reason for annoying users is automatic playback without the user’s consent, such as opening a page and suddenly having a sound. To this end, Firefox will adjust the relevant interface to guide developers on how to handle the playback of audio and video and ensure that the interception is automatically prevented without affecting the normal use of the user.
The new version of Firefox will begin to automatically intercept video with sound or audio. At the same time, it is allowed to resume playback after the user interacts with the webpage. The most typical of this interaction is that the user manually clicks the play button, and the user can manually play the volume plus or minus button to resume playback of the sound. Mozilla wrote,
“Starting with the release of Firefox 66 for desktop and Firefox for Android, Firefox will block audible audio and video by default. We only allow a site to play audio or video aloud via the
HTMLMediaElement
API once a web page has had user interaction to initiate the audio, such as the user clicking on a “play” button.”
In addition to these conditions, any video with sound will be automatically muted, that is, the video will play but the user must click to trigger the audio. For developers, it is necessary to adjust and adapt to the new interface in time to guide the user to click the button to resume playback, so as to minimize the impact of mute. For users, if you frequently watch a video of a website, you can add the website to the whitelist, so you don’t need to resume playback every time you click.