1295064 - Disable autoplay medias on the mobile devices by default

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Audio/Video, defect, P3)

Description

[C.M.Chang[:chunmin]]

It would be better to be default off 'autoplay' property on mobile devices to reduce power consumption.

Comment 1

[C.M.Chang[:chunmin]]

Attachment: Bug 1295064 - Disable autoplay medias on mobile devices by default;

Review commit: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/71498/diff/#index_header
See other reviews: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/71498/

Comment 2

[C.M.Chang[:chunmin]]

Hi rbarker,
Since I saw you was the reviewer of bug 1188240 that disable auto-playing of media on Android 2.3-4.0, would you mind giving me a review?

Comment 3

[James Willcox (:snorp) ([e-mail]) (he/him)]

I think we need PM/UX to decide if this is something we should do.

Comment 4

[Barbara Bermes [:barbara] - NI please!]

Need a bit more info here:

Would the default be off always even if the website owner sets autoplay to on? 

We could bundle this with our "data savings efforts":
- enable/disable web fonts
- enable/disable images
- and then enable/disable autoplay on media, have it not "overrule" the website's preference by default

That would not only reduce battery consumption but also data consumption:

Comment 5

[James Willcox (:snorp) ([e-mail]) (he/him)]

(In reply to Barbara Bermes [:barbara] from comment #4)
> Need a bit more info here:
> 
> Would the default be off always even if the website owner sets autoplay to
> on? 

Yes. The only way media is ever autoplayed is if the content makes it so.

Comment 6

[Randall Barker [:rbarker]]

I do not believe this is correct solution. When people enabled this on desktop it broke a number of video sites such as YouTube and Vimeo. Users need to opt into this, otherwise we will be breaking the web for our users. I believe we should be more aggressive about blocking auto playing media (especially ads) but I do not believe this is the correct solution.

Comment 7

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

FYI, here is an article about "HTML5 video autoplay on mobile".
https://walterebert.com/blog/video-autoplay-on-mobile/

Comment 8

[C.M.Chang[:chunmin]]

(In reply to Randall Barker [:rbarker] from comment #6)
> I do not believe this is correct solution. When people enabled this on
> desktop it broke a number of video sites such as YouTube and Vimeo. Users
> need to opt into this, otherwise we will be breaking the web for our users.
> I believe we should be more aggressive about blocking auto playing media
> (especially ads) but I do not believe this is the correct solution.
Hi Randall,
I might not get your point here, could you provide more hints? Do you mean we need to modify HTMLMediaElement::IsAllowedToPlay[0]? What's the conditions we will still play the media automatically even when we set media.autoplay.enabled to false?

[0] http://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/b35975ec17c8227e827800fa2d9642655cb103a8/dom/html/HTMLMediaElement.cpp#5636

Comment 9

[C.M.Chang[:chunmin]]

A bit more info for UX:
1. The current approach is to turn off "Allow autoplay"(Settings -> Advance ->Allow autoplay) by default. 2. Chrome and Opera doesn't allow autoplay on mobile phone now.

Maybe we could discuss whether or not we need to keep enabling this on Fennec.

Comment 10

[Anthony Lam (:antlam) Find me, @antlam on Slack!]

Hey Chun-Min,

Are you suggesting we force all media content inside our mobile browser to NOT autoplay, regardless of the content providers intention?

Comment 11

[Randall Barker [:rbarker]]

(In reply to Chun-Min Chang[:chunmin] from comment #8)
> (In reply to Randall Barker [:rbarker] from comment #6)
> > I do not believe this is correct solution. When people enabled this on
> > desktop it broke a number of video sites such as YouTube and Vimeo. Users
> > need to opt into this, otherwise we will be breaking the web for our users.
> > I believe we should be more aggressive about blocking auto playing media
> > (especially ads) but I do not believe this is the correct solution.
> Hi Randall,
> I might not get your point here, could you provide more hints? Do you mean
> we need to modify HTMLMediaElement::IsAllowedToPlay[0]? What's the
> conditions we will still play the media automatically even when we set
> media.autoplay.enabled to false?
> 
> [0]
> http://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/
> b35975ec17c8227e827800fa2d9642655cb103a8/dom/html/HTMLMediaElement.cpp#5636

I my main issue is that enabling this feature broke some websites. That is one reason we left it off by default but allowed users to opt in. Some video sites that use custom video controls assume that starting a video with a script will always succeed and thus never check that the video did indeed begin to play. This sometimes puts the controls in a state they were unable to recover from. Things may have changed from when this was added. At a minimum, we should verify that enabling this by default will not break any of the major video sites.

Comment 12

[Blake Wu [:bwu][:blakewu]]

It is strange that not supporting autoplay would break some websites, since I saw most browsers don't support it on mobile in the link[1] in comment 7.  

https://walterebert.com/blog/video-autoplay-on-mobile/

Comment 13

[C.M.Chang[:chunmin]]

(In reply to Anthony Lam (:antlam) from comment #10)
> Hey Chun-Min,
> 
> Are you suggesting we force all media content inside our mobile browser to
> NOT autoplay, regardless of the content providers intention?
Yes.
Other browser vendors like chrome and opera don't allow autoplay neither. Many cellular network providers charge based on the amount of data consumed, in order to protect user’s bandwidth, I think it's better to disable autoplay on mobile devices so it would not start racking up data charges.

Comment 14

[Anthony Lam (:antlam) Find me, @antlam on Slack!]

(In reply to Chun-Min Chang[:chunmin] from comment #13)
> (In reply to Anthony Lam (:antlam) from comment #10)
> > Hey Chun-Min,
> > 
> > Are you suggesting we force all media content inside our mobile browser to
> > NOT autoplay, regardless of the content providers intention?
> Yes.
> Other browser vendors like chrome and opera don't allow autoplay neither.

Hm, I'm not sure how I feel about this. I'd like to discuss this with Barbara first.

If I'm understanding correctly, this isn't a high priority issue at the moment? feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

> Many cellular network providers charge based on the amount of data consumed,
> in order to protect user’s bandwidth, I think it's better to disable
> autoplay on mobile devices so it would not start racking up data charges.

I know that this is one side of the story. And I definitely agree with the advantages here. But I think there are also disadvantages that we need to consider. 

For example, some site authors might be using this autoplay feature as a part of their experience. Turning this off might seem like a good idea at first but we can't guarantee that it would be easy to "turn on" from the user's point of view.

The point is, there are many repercussions to consider before we decide.

Please allow me and Barbara discuss this first. :)

Comment 15

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

(In reply to Chun-Min Chang[:chunmin] from comment #13)
> Other browser vendors like chrome and opera don't allow autoplay neither.
> Many cellular network providers charge based on the amount of data consumed,
> in order to protect user’s bandwidth, I think it's better to disable
> autoplay on mobile devices so it would not start racking up data charges.

As much as I would personally like to see autoplay disabled, Chris Peterson pointed out that when Chrome did so, it was actually worse for their bandwidth and power usage in some cases, because advertised worked around it with worse things.

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.platform/cYkjjvQsODo/FM1ERvR7AwAJ

Comment 16

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

s/advertised/advertisers/

Comment 17

[Randall Barker [:rbarker]]

Comment on attachment 8780978 [details]
Bug 1295064 - Disable autoplay medias on mobile devices by default;

I'm going to cancel the review until there is a decision on this.

Comment 18

[timbugzilla]

Any progress on this?

Comment 19

[C.M.Chang[:chunmin]]

No need this anymore