1474263 - Make sure disabling of audio autoplay is properly documented

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Developer Documentation Graveyard :: API: Web Audio, enhancement, P1)

Description

[Chris Mills [:cmills]]

See this thread for context: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform/39Q3fW3zl1E

I asked Chris Pearce about the best place to track engineering progress on this, and he said to use the tracking bug: "The tracking bug is a good place to follow what's going on, all relevant bugs directly or indirectly block this one:
(block-autoplay) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1376321"

He also gave me some other useful info:

"We already have a note here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLMediaElement/play but that could do with being more fleshed out as to what behaviour unblocks autoplay.

Certainly it makes sense to mention this elsewhere in the the MDN docs, maybe in https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/HTML/Multimedia_and_embedding/Video_and_audio_content as well, or elsewhere?"

"In terms of time frame, we should really be communicating what we're doing before we enable this feature, but we won't really know what were exactly doing (with respect to prompting users to approve autoplay for example) until we have the results of the shield study. So we won't know our final behaviour until we've had time for 63 to be in release long enough for us to run a shield study in our release population. That said, the general advice that applies to other browsers applies to us as well, so we can just document that for now."

Comment 1

[Janet Swisher]

According to a note in the DocTracker spreadsheet, this was supposed to be a P1.

Comment 2

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

This is done, or as done as it can be at this time given the not-ready-for-consumption state of parts of the Web Audio autoplay blocking functionality.

Comment 3

[Chris Mills [:cmills]]

autoplay docs being tracked at https://trello.com/c/4emMB6Y8/146-autoplay-api-fx-66