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[Link Posting] Firefox taking a hard line against noisy video, banning it from autoplaying

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  [Link Posting] Firefox taking a hard line against noisy video, banning it from autoplaying Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2019-04-13 01:29 +0000
    Re: [Link Posting] Firefox taking a hard line against noisy video, banning it from autoplaying RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2019-04-13 18:33 +0000
      Re: [Link Posting] Firefox taking a hard line against noisy video, banning it from autoplaying Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2019-04-13 20:20 +0000
      Re: [Link Posting] Firefox taking a hard line against noisy video, banning it from autoplaying not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) - 2019-04-13 22:21 +0000
      Re: [Link Posting] Firefox taking a hard line against noisy video, banning it from autoplaying Dmitry Alexandrov <321942@gmail.com> - 2019-04-15 10:03 +0300

#17807 — [Link Posting] Firefox taking a hard line against noisy video, banning it from autoplaying

      ####################################################################
      # ATTENTION: This post is a reference to a website.  The poster of #
      # this Usenet article is not the author of the referenced website. #
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<URL:https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/firefox-to-block-noisy-auto
playing-video-in-next-release/>

The text below is a quotation from the URL above:
>
>  Last year, Chrome introduced changes to try to prevent the persistent
>  nuisance that is pages that automatically play noisy videos. Next month,
>  Firefox will be following suit; Firefox 66, due on March 19, will
>  prevent the automatic playback of any video that contains audio.
>
>  Mozilla's plan for Firefox is a great deal simpler and a great deal
>  stricter than Chrome's system. In Chrome, Google has a heuristic that
>  tries to distinguish between those sites where autoplaying is generally
>  welcome (Netflix and YouTube, for example) and those where it isn't
>  (those annoying sites that have autoplaying video tucked away in a
>  corner to startle you when it starts making unexpected sounds). Firefox
>  isn't doing anything like that; by default, any site that tries to play
>  video with audio will have that video playback blocked.
>
>  ...

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#17808

On 2019-04-13, Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:
>>
>>  Last year, Chrome introduced changes to try to prevent the
>>  persistent nuisance that is pages that automatically play noisy
>>  videos. Next month, Firefox will be following suit; Firefox 66, due
>>  on March 19, will prevent the automatic playback of any video that
>>  contains audio.

Sounds good to me.  I wish they'd block video of all forms.  I'm
ocassionally appalled, when working on expensive or low bandwidth
connections, to hit a webpage that's aggressively sucking down video
advertising.  Lynx to the rescue, but it shouldn't have to be that way.

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#17811

RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> wrote:
> On 2019-04-13, Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:
>>>
>>>  Last year, Chrome introduced changes to try to prevent the
>>>  persistent nuisance that is pages that automatically play noisy
>>>  videos. Next month, Firefox will be following suit; Firefox 66, due
>>>  on March 19, will prevent the automatic playback of any video that
>>>  contains audio.
> 
> Sounds good to me.  I wish they'd block video of all forms.

Same here.  But there was a comment on the related Hacker News thread 
that said why this might not work as we would like.  It went something 
like this:

1) Browsers block <video> tag from playing
2) Advertisers switch to animated .gif's
3) Browsers block animated .gif's from playing
4) Advertisers switch to running JS to change the src of an image tag 
   to simulated 'video'
5) Browsers block changing image tag src attributes
6) Advertisers switch to running JS to 'draw' video on a canvas element
7) ... repeat as long as you like ...

Now, the items from 4 down do require JS be running, and as I block all 
JS by default with NoScript, those 'workarounds' would fail for those 
advertisers.  But the reality is that the advertisers will try anything 
they can to get their video ads to play, and they don't care how much 
heat your CPU generates doing it, or how much shorter your battery life 
(if on mobile or laptop) is because of what they are doing.

At least blocking sound, but letting the video part of the <video> tag 
play, provides a good happy medium.  You don't get your computer/phone 
suddenly blurting out an ad in a tea house when you just wanted to 
check the evening's weather report, but the advertisers are not fully 
pushed to try to play 'whack-a-mole' either.

> I'm ocassionally appalled, when working on expensive or low bandwidth 
> connections, to hit a webpage that's aggressively sucking down video 
> advertising.

Credit that, in some ways, to most all web devs having 8+CPU, 32 or 
64GB+, SSD, workstations, and falling into the false belief that such 
is the computational power for all their end users as well.

> Lynx to the rescue, but it shouldn't have to be that way.

No, but Lynx does ignore all those pesky things.

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#17812

RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> wrote:
> On 2019-04-13, Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:
>>>
>>>  Last year, Chrome introduced changes to try to prevent the
>>>  persistent nuisance that is pages that automatically play noisy
>>>  videos. Next month, Firefox will be following suit; Firefox 66, due
>>>  on March 19, will prevent the automatic playback of any video that
>>>  contains audio.
> 
> Sounds good to me.  I wish they'd block video of all forms.  I'm
> ocassionally appalled, when working on expensive or low bandwidth
> connections, to hit a webpage that's aggressively sucking down video
> advertising.  Lynx to the rescue, but it shouldn't have to be that way.

Before HTML5 NoScript always blocked them on my FireFox installs, and
before HTML5 became widespread, some problem to do with libavcodec
caused video playback to stop working in FireFox on my laptop, which
is where I go to those sorts of sites. On top of that I make a point
of ensuring that DRM is disabled, and that stops many of them before
they get to the libavcodec roadblock. So basically the complexity of
the whole system has caused it to block itself for me.

If I ever do want to view a video, youtube-dl is wonderful. Although
I did always download YouTube videos in the low resolution 3GP format
option and I was very disappointed to find that they seem to have
dropped that recently. Now videos take much longer to download and
use more space (I tend to keep all of them), and I can't even send
YouTube a grumpy Email about it because I'm not using their service
as intended in the first place.

-- 
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#_ < |\| |< _#

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#17813

[Multipart message — attachments visible in raw view] — view raw

RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> wrote:
> On 2019-04-13, Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:
>>>
>>> Firefox 66, due on March 19, will prevent the automatic playback of any video that contains audio.
>
> Sounds good to me.  I wish they'd block video of all forms.  I'm ocassionally appalled, when working on expensive or low bandwidth connections, to hit a webpage that's aggressively sucking down video advertising.

That’s while using someone else’s machine, you mean?  Otherwise, why do you care about defaults?  No autoplay as an option has been always there.

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