1665584 - Pip "Mute" button unmuted if "Play" button is clicked on Euronews.com and bbc.com

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Picture-in-Picture, defect, P5)

Description

[Alexandra Martin]

Attachment: euronews pip mute button.gif

Affected platforms:
Windows 10 x64bit
MacOS 10.14

Affected versions:
Nightly 82.0a1

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open Firefox.
2. Go to https://www.euronews.com/2020/09/15/art-paris-spring-fair-finally-goes-ahead-at-grand-palais-des-champs-elysees of any other video from the "Featured" section from https://euronews.com.
3. Hover over the playing video and click the "Picture-in-Picture" button, possibly after ads.
4. Pause and mute the video using the designated buttons.
5. Click the "Play" button.

Expected result:
Picture-in-Picture window is still muted.

Actual result:
Picture-in-Picture window is unmuted.

Regression-Range:
Not a regression, since it's reproducing from the very start when the "Mute" button was added to Pip.

DEBUG : Found commit message: Bug 1601761 - Enable the PiP audio toggle in nightly. r=mconley
Differential Revision: https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D56055

Pushlog: https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/pushloghtml?fromchange=f488aff3fc9c04e89e3b6bb06483c8a638f8461f&tochange=91db74da5f4a5b10fc47606b168a3ad0618acfd7

Severity Suggestion:
I would suggest S3 severity since the "Mute" button is only available on Nightly and only videos from the "Featured" section seem to be affected.

Notes:
Only reproducing on Nightly. Beta and Release versions have the "Mute" button disabled.
Only videos from the "Featured" section seem to be affected by this bug.
Also reproduced on https://www.bbc.com/ videos.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (out for now; he/him)]

This will be a consequence of the toggle responding to the mute state of the video on the page. The site should ideally Not Do That.

Not sure what we want to do here, because although we could enforce muting/unmuting again, the site could override it again if they really want to, and the end-result would just be confusing for users. We could require user interaction state from the webpage for writing to the video's muted state, but that might break other things. We could make the mute toggle interact with the entire document's "mute" state, but that doesn't work well with multi-video PiP.

The other thing we could do is try to add per-site compat shims that deal with this kind of thing by updating mute state in the video control software that's used or something, as the same issue doesn't happen (at least on the BBC) when using the BBC player's "mute" control.

Comment 2

[David]

In working with this bug, it seems that now euronews has this issue for both the parent player and the PiP player so even though the parent and PiP players have the mute state synched, euronews will unmute regardless of if we're manipulating the parent player or not. As a result it seems like something that shouldn't be fixed on the PiP end now because then we will have different functionality between the PiP player and the parent video.

Comment 3

[Daniel Bodea [:danibodea]]

This issue still occurs on the latest Nightly v101.0a1 from 2022-04-04.

I believe that this bug is not bad enough to disable the Mute button altogether.

Comment 4

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

Redirect a needinfo that is pending on an inactive user to the triage owner.
:mconley, since the bug has recent activity, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.