Mozilla joins Google’s Chrome browser and Microsoft Edge in fighting back against annoying websites.
Mozilla announced today that its Firefox web browser will start automatically blocking auto-playing video and audio later this year. The feature will appear in the release of Firefox 66 for desktop and an update to Firefox for Android, both of which are scheduled to be released on March 19th.
According to Mozilla, the upcoming release will prevent any audio or video from playing without a prompt from the user. That means you’ll have to click on a “play” button or something similar to allow the content to start. Any playback that happens before the user has interacted with a page via a mouse click, printable key press, or touch event, is deemed to be autoplay and will be blocked if it is potentially audible.
The Firefox team confirmed that this update expect to roll out audible autoplay blocking enabled by default, in Firefox 66, scheduled for general release on 19 March 2019. In Firefox for Android, this will replace the existing block autoplay implementation with the same behavior we’ll be using in Firefox on desktop.
Websites that you have previously granted camera or microphone permission will continue to autoplay as standard unless you revoke these permissions. Which is something worth noting.
