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Chris Siebenmann :: CSpace >> blog >> web >>
FirefoxMediaAutoplaySettingsIV
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Some notes on Firefox's media autoplay settings in practice as of
Firefox 124

March 29, 2024

I've been buying digital music from one of the reasonably good online
sources of it (the one that recently got acquired, again, making
people nervous about its longer term future). In addition to the
DRM-free lossless downloads of your purchases, this place lets you
stream albums through your web browser, which in my case is an
instance of Firefox. Recently, I noticed that my Firefox instance at
work would seamlessly transition from one track to the next track of
an album I was streaming, regardless of which label's sub-site I was
on, while my home Firefox would not; when one track ended, the home
Firefox would normally pause rather than start playing the next
track.

(I listen to both albums I've purchased and albums I haven't and I'm
just checking out. The former play through the main page for my
collection, while the latter are scattered around various URLs,
because each label or artist gets a <label>.<mumble>.com sub-domain
for its releases, and then each release has its own page. For the
obvious reasons, I long ago set my home Firefox to allow my
collection's main page to autoplay music so it could seamlessly move
from one track to the next.)

Both browser instances were set to disallow autoplay in general in
the Preferences - Privacy & Security (see Allow or block media
autoplay in Firefox), and inspection of the per-site settings showed
that my work Firefox actually had granted no autoplay permissions to
sites while my home Firefox had a list of various subdomains for this
particular vendor that were allowed to autoplay. After spelunking my
about:config, I identified this as a difference in
media.autoplay.blocking_policy, where the work Firefox had this set
to the default of '0' while my home Firefox had a long-standing
setting of '2'.

As discussed in Mozilla's wiki page on blocking media autoplay, the
default setting for this preference allows autoplay once you've
interacted with that tab, while my setting of '2' requires that you
always click to (re)start audio or video playing (unless the site has
been granted autoplay permissions). Historically I set this to '2' to
try to stop Youtube from autoplaying a second video after my first
one had finished. In practice this usage has been rendered
functionally obsolete by Youtube's own 'disable autoplay' setting in
its video player (although it still works to prevent autoplay if I've
forgotten to turn that on in this Firefox session or if Youtube is in
a playlist and ignores that setting).

(For both Youtube and this digital music source, a setting of '1', a
transient user gesture activation, is functionally equivalent to '2'
for me because it will normally be more than five seconds before the
video or track finishes playing, which means that the permission will
have expired by the time the site wants to advance to the next
thing.)

Since I check out multi-track albums much more often than I look at
Youtube videos (in this Firefox), and Youtube these days does have a
reliable 'disable autoplay' setting, I opted to leave
media.autoplay.blocking_policy set to '0' in the work Firefox
instance I use for this stuff and I've just changed it to '0' in my
home one as well. I could avoid this if I set up a custom profile for
this music source, but I haven't quite gotten to that point yet.

(I do wish Firefox allowed, effectively, per-site settings of this as
part of the per-site autoplay permissions, but I also understand why
they don't; I'm sure the Preferences and per-site settings UI
complexity would be something to see.)

(If I'd thought to check my previous notes on this I probably would
have been led to media.autoplay.blocking_policy right away, but it
didn't occur to me to check here, even though I knew I'd fiddled a
lot with Firefox media autoplay over the years. My past self writing
things down here doesn't guarantee that my future (present) self will
remember that they exist.)

PS: I actually go back and forth on automatically moving on to the
next track of an album I'm checking out, because the current 'stop
after one track' behavior does avoid me absently listening to the
whole thing. If I find myself unintentionally listening to too many
albums that in theory I'm only checking out, I'll change the setting
back.

Written on 29 March 2024.

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