Some of the most widely used web browsers already block autoplaying web audio. It can be a nuisance when you open a new tab and it immediately starts playing audio. The browsers offer users the ability to prevent that from happening. Firefox is joining that list of browsers as well since it has added an option to block autoplaying web audio.
The latest Nightly builds that Mozilla has released for Firefox come with a feature to prevent tabs from autoplaying audio. This is certainly going to make life much easier for users since they don’t have to worry about audio blasting through their speakers without warning.
The feature offers three options to users. They can either allow web audio autoplay for all websites, force the browser to ask for permission for each website (the audio won’t play until permission is granted) or block autoplaying audio for any and all websites.
Since this is a Nightly release, there’s bound to be bugs in this version of Firefox. It’s going to be a couple of weeks at the very least before this feature makes it to the beta build. So it’s going to be a wait of over a month, if not more, for users of the stable Firefox version.
We are adding the ability to block and configure autoplaying videos with sound in Firefox, can check it out in @FirefoxNightly today (comments welcome) pic.twitter.com/k9K9hQC9Ye
— Dale Harvey (@daleharvey) July 21, 2018