Autoplaying video is a persisting problem on the internet and Mozilla has decided to stop this problem from appearing on its own browser by introducing a new “autoplay blocking” feature. The upcoming Mozilla Firefox 66 will come with the feature that would block autoplaying videos unless the users manually click the play button.
The feature, which is said to come for desktop and Android platform, will debut on March 19.
In a blog post announcing the new feature, Mozilla has defined the autoplaying videos as “any playback that happens before the user has interacted with a page via a mouse click, printable key press, or touch event.” Mozilla adds that the videos will be blocked unless it is specifically unblocked by users. Users will also be allowed to manually select the sites that will be granted the autoplay option.
Firefox is not the first browser to introduce an autoplay blocking feature as Google had already introduced a similar feature last year. Google used a more personalized approach that used browsing preferences to determine which site would want blocking, instead of the broader ban that Firefox is offering.
Although Firefox has added the new restrictions, it will still allow users to opt-in for the “autoplay sound” from the default setting. The feature will let users select certain websites for which they prefer the audible autoplay of audio and video.
Nevertheless, Firefox will only mute the autoplaying videos which means the videos will keep running in the background without any sound and might eat up user’s bandwidth.
“At this time, we’re also working on blocking autoplay for Web Audio content, but have not yet finalized our implementation but expect to ship the feature sometime in 2019,” Chris Pearce, Engineer, Mozilla wrote in a blog post on Monday.
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