We implemented 2 versions ago, however we wanted to do some user testing to make sure it wasnt going to break too many websites and annoy too many users (We ended up changing the behaviour based on those tests).
It will ship and be enabled by default in Firefox 66, it will not have a whitelist of allowed websites but autoplay on all websites will be disabled by default (configurable obviously), if autoplay is blocked there will be a small notification in the url bar to tell you and give you the chance to enable it for that site only if you so wish
As a quick side note, I just want to throw out how grateful I am both as a developer and as a user that Firefox handled autoplay blocking in a sane way.
- An actual notification the user can see and control, which means as a developer I can give people an easy way to re-enable audio if something breaks.
- Actual user controls instead of an opaque algorithm I can't override that randomly decides for me on the fly whether or not I want to hear something played.
- No default whitelist, which means when I turn it off, it actually turns off everywhere, and I don't have to spend a week wondering if the next link I click on is just going to start autoplaying anyway because the site is popular.
It still boggles my mind that Chromium's policy is to just turn autoplay back on if you navigate to a new page on the same domain. It makes the entire feature worthless, it's like they assume the only way users are ever going to visit websites is from a search page or social links.
I don't think Firefox's policy is perfect -- user gestures are interpreted so broadly that they're incredibly easy to abuse[0], and I fully expect websites to start widely abusing them in the future. And the UI for adding exceptions is still really cumbersome -- as a developer I wish there was some way to whitelist domains from the notification bar without going into settings.
But all of this is just quibbles, the implementation is fine. It's just so much more straightforward and logical than what Chromium is doing. I'm at the point where I'm just really happy that Firefox is still rolling out features with predictable behaviors that feel, for lack of a better word, sensible.
I feel like increasingly where features like this are concerned, Firefox is the adult in the room, and for whatever it's worth, I really appreciate y'all being there. Seriously, I hope that everyone on the Firefox team feels good about themselves when they go home at night. I think you're doing good work.
> And the UI for adding exceptions is still really
> cumbersome -- as a developer I wish there was some
> way to whitelist domains from the notification bar
> without going into settings.
It will ship and be enabled by default in Firefox 66, it will not have a whitelist of allowed websites but autoplay on all websites will be disabled by default (configurable obviously), if autoplay is blocked there will be a small notification in the url bar to tell you and give you the chance to enable it for that site only if you so wish