1486540 - firefox is autoplaying videos on startup

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Rockvole]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/62.0.3202.75 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

This can be reproduced by either turning on the machine manually, or my machine is set to automatically turn on each day. This happened on britbox.com - playing a series which has over 20 episodes in it.
The machine is a Mac Mini running MacOS 10.13.6 which I use as a media player.


Actual results:

I came home to hear the sound of the video playing and realised that when the machine turned on firefox automatically started playing videos from the series I was currently watching.


Expected results:

Firefox should not be autoplaying videos on browser startup and using up hundreds of megabytes of my data allowance (which takes me effort to stay within each month). This has never happened in the last 6 months using the chrome browser with britbox.

Comment 1

[Rockvole]

The collected User agent string wont help you, I am typing this on a different machine.
Browser used was Firefox Quantum 61.0.2 64-bit

Comment 2

[Daniel_A[:daschilean] [Please contact - [e-mail]]]

Hi Rockvole,

Could you please check if the autoplay option is available on the "britbox.com" website. Or here you have the steps with how to stop autoplay for all websites:
"https://support.apple.com/guide/safari/stop-autoplay-videos-ibrw29c6ecf8/mac".

Comment 3

[Rockvole]

Hi Daniel,
There are no settings in the britbox website of any sort. Just billing / subscription type details.
The mac was set up from blank drives as a media box and has not had any settings changed in the browsers.

Are you saying that the settings in Safari affect how firefox plays videos ?

Comment 4

[Daniel_A[:daschilean] [Please contact - [e-mail]]]

I think it will be a good idea to retest this on Firefox Nightly. Here is a link form where you can install Firefox Nightly: https://nightly.mozilla.org. You can also type about:config in the address bar and press the Enter key. Click on the warning button "I accept the risk!". Search for media.autoplay.enabled and set to false.

Comment 5

[Rockvole]

Hi Daniel,
I didn't try the nightly build. I changed the media.autoplay.enabled to false and I haven't had any autoplay problems since.
Thanks.

Comment 6

[Daniel_A[:daschilean] [Please contact - [e-mail]]]

Hi Rockvole,

Based on Comment5 I will mark this as Resolved-WFM.
If the issue is still reproducible with the latest Firefox version, feel free to reopen the bug.