1631708 - Firefox unnecessarily blocks audio from pinned tabs

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Caspy7]

Attachment: Background pinned tab audio

This is something that's been bothering me for a few years now.
I frequently miss the audio notifications from my pinned calendar tab because it got blocked. I'll later notice that there is little play button (as you can see in my screenshot).

My pinned tabs are like my home apps and I always want my calendar to be able to play its chimes.

Solutions I'd be fine with:
a) Asking once and for all if I want to allow this tab to always play background audio
b) Just letting pinned tabs play background audio because my pinning it indicates a desire for higher priority attention

In the UX chat room ntim suggested whitelisting short audio for autoplay, which I'd also be fine with as it solves my problem.

Comment 1

[Negritas Sergiu, Desktop QA]

Hello I didn't manage to reproduce the issue described with google calendar as seen from the screenshot, but i managed to reproduce it on Firefox nightly 77.0a1, Firefox 75 and Firefox 76.0b7 using other websites. The pinned tab played sounds after I added an exception for edition.cnn.com/videos and gmail. I would like to mention that after restart the pinned tabs didn't start playing sounds automatically only after I clicked on them once and waited for them to load. Also it think this issue is a tabbed browser one so I will change the component and add the corresponding flags so one of our developers could look more into it. If it's not the right component please feel free to change it to an appropriate one.
Could you please provide some steps in reproducing the issue and do any of the pinned tabs has the autoplay feature enabled?

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Negritas Sergiu, Desktop QA from comment #1)

...
Could you please provide some steps in reproducing the issue and do any of the pinned tabs has the autoplay feature enabled?

Caspy do you have better steps?

Comment 3

[jaime [:jabramson]]

I started looking into this and I think I have some good steps to reproduce (someone please let me know if I'm getting any of this wrong!):

• I first enabled desktop notifications for my Gmail in Nightly (see screenshots -- In Settings > General I first clicked the "Click here to enable desktop notifications for Mozilla Mail" link, then clicked "Allow" in the popup, then ensured "New mail notifications on" is selected in settings)
• Then I sent myself an email and validated the sound plays as expected (yep). I think the sound plays regardless of whether the browser window or pinned tab is active or in the background.
• Pinned my Gmail tab and sent myself another email and validated that the sound still plays as expected
• Quit Nightly and re-launched (Gmail tab still pinned)
• Sent myself another email and noticed this one shows the play icon in the tab but no audio is heard

I'm also noticing that there are two different play button icons that appear. See screenshots, I think the one that looks like a speaker with curvy lines coming out of it is what shows when audio plays and the one one that looks like a play button triangle shows when there's no audio. I think.

Comment 4

[jaime [:jabramson]]

Attachment: gmail-desktop-notifications.png

Comment 5

[jaime [:jabramson]]

Attachment: allow-notifications.png

Comment 6

[jaime [:jabramson]]

Attachment: icon-no-audio.png

Comment 7

[jaime [:jabramson]]

Attachment: icon-with-audio.png

Comment 8

[BugBot (nomail) [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The bug assignee is inactive on Bugzilla, so the assignee is being reset.