1633565 - Pause all media within Firefox when pressing `pause` media key

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Audio/Video: Playback, task, P3)

Description

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

Currently, when pressing pause media keys, it would only affect the last tab playing media. If we have multiple tabs playing media at the same time, other tabs won't be paused, which seems not a good UX, because I think user would expect that pressing pause are able to pause all media within Firefox.

In addition, this situaion also happens within a single tab. Assume that a tab contains an iframe which has active media session. When the main frame and child frame are playing media at the same time, then pressing pause in this situation, we would only pause the child frame, the media in main frame is still playing which is also not a good UX.

Comment 1

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

After some experimenting, I will not implement pausing all media within a same page in this bug, becuase my original way seems not compatible with Chrome and might not fit with the spec.

My original idea is that calling the default action handler anytime when pause or stop is being pressed even if the website has its customized action handlers for them, because at that time I thought that's what Chrome does. However, after I tested more possiblilities, I realised that what they do is not simply calling default action handler, they seems calling different handlers on each different frames. That is what we can't do in the current artitecture.

Therefore, I will focus on pausing other tabs in this bug, and use a follow-up bug to implement pausing all media within a same page.

Comment 2

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

Attachment: Bug 1633565 - part1 : store an internal state to allow controller know if it's the main controller or not.

Comment 3

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

Attachment: Bug 1633565 - part3 : pause/stop media without affecting media session.

Comment 4

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

Attachment: Bug 1633565 - part2 : pressing 'pause/stop' would affect other controllers as well.

Comment 5

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

Attachment: Bug 1633565 - part4 : add test.

Comment 6

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

After discussed with chum-min offline, we decided not to make this change because it might cause user's confusion why pressing pause can affect multiple tabs but pressing other keys can't. Considering the plan to implement media hub, this change would probably introduce more confusion so discard all these changes.