1804770 - Add a pref to control video wakelock

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Audio/Video, defect)

Description

[Tim Connors]

+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #1749187 +++

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/91.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Run firefox with a normal selection of tabs open to a variety of sites (can't tell you which one, because I don't know which of many sites is triggering the problem, because of the way the inhibition is reported - see below). Probably youtube.

2. Kill gnome screensaver and xscreensaver.

3. Run xscreensaver -verbose

Actual results:

This set of messages is relayed by xsreensaver every 30 seconds:

xscreensaver-systemd: 21:26:54: uninhibited by "firefox-esr" with cookie 0FE73BCD
xscreensaver-systemd: 21:26:55: inhibit: unable to get pid of "firefox-esr": No data available
xscreensaver-systemd: 21:26:55: inhibited by "firefox-esr" with "video-playing" -> cookie 002B8F6E
xscreensaver-systemd: 21:27:25: uninhibited by "firefox-esr" with cookie 002B8F6E
xscreensaver-systemd: 21:27:26: inhibit: unable to get pid of "firefox-esr": No data available
xscreensaver-systemd: 21:27:26: inhibited by "firefox-esr" with "video-playing" -> cookie C5E68D51
xscreensaver-systemd: 21:27:56: inhibited by "firefox-esr" since Sun Jan  9 21:27:26 2022
xscreensaver-systemd: 21:27:56: exec: xscreensaver-command -verbose -deactivate
xscreensaver: ClientMessage DEACTIVATE received while inactive: resetting idle timer.
xscreensaver-command: not active: idle timer reset.

And the screensaver never is invoked. If the user forcefully invokes the screensaver to turn off their screen of a night, the screen is awakened again within 30 seconds. None of that output tells me why firefox considers a video is playing somewhere - like #1744641, the supposedly human-readable text doesn't tell what video is playing. What URL? What tab? None of my tabs have a video symbol on them. They're not searchable in my window alt-tab list. I'm guessing it's some silly ad somewhere on a page I don't care about in the first place, on a page that might be self-refreshing so continually reloading a video. Either way, something, somewhere on the untrusted web is telling my machine that I'm not allowed to invoke the screensaver, that it is too important to be hidden.

Expected results:

1. The user should be given a choice, perhaps even hidden in about:config, to blanket ignore any requests to inhibit the screensaver (in my case, I never want firefox to inhibit the screensaver as I only watch videos in a real video player, but some people clearly want it).

2. The "video-playing" text should change to be something useful.

Comment 1

[Tim Connors]

Cloned from #1749187 since whoever triaged it put it against the wrong component and they closed it only fixing a tiny part of the problem.

Comment 2

[az [:az]]

Hi Alastor, this looks related to 1804168 -- would you have any thoughts here?

Comment 3

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

We can do #1 easily by creating a pref to allow users to control display wakelock in case they want to be opt out.

Comment 4

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

Attachment: Bug 1804770 - add a pref to control video wakelock.

Comment 5

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/833ec9b543da
add a pref to control video wakelock. r=azebrowski

Comment 6

[Sandor Molnar[:smolnar]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/833ec9b543da