1710779 - Autoplay settings not working for Reddit

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

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

Description

[Tim]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:90.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/90.0

Steps to reproduce:

Go to Settings->Privacy and Security->Permissions->Autoplay
Set "Default for all websites" to "Block Audio and Video"
Go to https:www.reddit.com

Actual results:

Embedded videos will play despite the setting.

Expected results:

Videos should not play unless I actively click on them to start playback

Comment 1

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

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Audio/Video: Playback' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please revert this change in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Jon Bauman [:jbauman:]]

Hi Tim,

I'm not observing any videos on reddit autoplaying incorrectly on macOS with 90.0a1 (2021-05-05). Do you have any specific examples you can link to? Additionally, some sites use various approaches for circumventing autoplay blocking, so you may find this page informative: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Media/block-autoplay. If you're still seeing this behavior, please try the other media.autoplay.blocking_policy settings described there and let me know what you observe.

Comment 3

[Tim]

For me, this video plays automatically:

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/nev2td/a_modified_us_1_dollar_coin_with_a_hidden_button/

Then I checked the media.autoplay.blocking_policy setting in about:config. It was set to 0. Setting this to 2 has fixed the issue, but is really a workaround because videos were autoplaying even though I had set the permissions for autoplay to "Block Audio and Bideo" through the standard user settings. I shoould not have to manually edit settings in about:coinfig to control this behaviour

Am I mistaken about the expected behaviour of the Settings->Privacy and Security->Permissions->Autoplay settings?

Comment 4

[Jon Bauman [:jbauman:]]

For me, this video plays automatically:

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/nev2td/a_modified_us_1_dollar_coin_with_a_hidden_button/

I also have media.autoplay.blocking_policy set to 0 (the default) and on macOS with 90.0a1 (2021-05-05 or 2021-05-18) the video on that page does not automatically play.

I'm unclear why the behavior is different on Linux, but I wonder if there's anything else different on your system. Do you see the same behavior if you try this in troubleshoot mode?

Comment 5

[Tim]

It seems to behave properly in troubleshoot mode

When I have some time I'll try to narrow down the extension responsible

Comment 6

[jessemerriman]

This problem is still happening.
Firefox 99.0.1 (64-bit)
User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:99.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/99.0

Block Audio and Video in both the settings as well as next to the address bar for reddit, either method the videos still autoplay.

Comment 7

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

Videos should not play unless I actively click on them to start playback

There is another policy which you can use by modifying the pref, which is doing the thing you need. The default blocking policy would only block autoplay before users interacts with the page. See here for more details.