1418950 - WebExtension API for autoplay toggle

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1391501

(WebExtensions :: Untriaged, enhancement)

Description

[Alexander]

Trying to port "Autoplay Toggle" [1] extension to Firefox 57. I found out that presently there is no access from WE to "about:config" settings [2]. 

Note that I'm not the author of that extension and not experienced at all with Firefox code, so don't know how to expose the autoplay setting in Firefox through WE.

In my opinion exposing all about:config settings is the right way to go, because exposing individual settings would be a tedious job for whatever extension needs that. I see no reason it should not be allowed provided extensions can easily break user experience without that access too. But on the other hand *not* allowing about:config modifications would limit a lot of extensions from doing their good job.

At the very least, I'm asking Firefox devs to expose the autoplay toggle setting in WE.

[1] https://github.com/Aligorith/fx_autoplay_toggle
[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37241450/how-to-change-firefox-preferences-aboutconfig-using-the-new-webextensions-api

Comment 1

[Jorge Villalobos [:jorgev] (he/him)]

Arbitrary access to preferences is not going to happen, but it may be possible to support that particular preference.

Comment 2

[Luca Greco [:rpl] [:luca] [:lgreco]]

Giving access to all the preferences available from "about:config" cannot happen as a WebExtensions API, the main reason is that giving a non-mediated API to toggle all of these preferences can lead to undefined behaviors (e.g. when multiple addons are going to try to control the same preference) and it is going to easily break when the internals related to the an "about:config" preferences are changing (because no explicit test case can be written if an API would allow to change any of the available settings).

On the contrary, we are evaluating (also based on the API requests) which preferences we can expose (and we are writing explicit test cases for them), See Bug 1363856 (which is the tracking issue related to "Implement WebExtensions API to give access to specific preferences").

Controlling the media.autoplay preference is already tracked by the following bugzilla issues:

- Bug 1391501 - Add an API to enable and disable media autoplay globally
- Bug 1405827 - Add an API to allow fine-grained control over media autoplay