464150 - Disable <video>/<audio> when image loading is disabled

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

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

Comment 1

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

Is this proposed as a Firefox 3.1 stopgap or a desired final solution?

Image disabling happens at two levels, the global permissions.default.image pref and then the per-domain settings managed by the permission manager. If you're tying the two then video/audio should obey both. But ultimately people will want more flexibility. A blind user, for example, may not care about images and want to save bandwidth, but still want to listen to audio and the audio track of videos.

The advantage for Firefox 3.1 is that this wouldn't require any new UI.

Comment 2

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Is bug 448600 not enough? Why should audio/video be disabled based on images, plugins don't get disabled with that. Beyond that, audio/video is very different from images:

1) Lots of images on the web are just ad banners, and so worth blocking.
2) Most images aren't content related, just more of polish and design, while audio/video are part of (if not the actual) content itself.

Comment 3

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

Short of implementing the ancient RFE about fine-grained per-site blocking of just about every load type, maybe plugins _should_ be blocked when images are blocked, too. For people who care turn "image" blocking into "media" blocking.

Comment 4

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

And I think you're hopelessly optimistic about video not being ads. Flash ads have been quite popular for some time, and "Flashblock" is one of the oldest addons because mere image blocking wasn't cutting it. Not that I expect <video> ads any time soon (not until its penetration is approaching flash levels), but don't write them off either.

I don't think the motivation behind this bug is ads though (hard to tell for sure with a blank comment 0). If you want to block ads get AdBlock Plus: it will handle video just as it does plugins and images.

That leaves bandwidth or accessibility, and since there's a global off switch as you note in comment 2 my best guess is that this is meant to hook into the per-site image-blocking permissions since that would be a way to get a useful feature without having to add more UI. At some loss of flexibility, but that flexibility would bring complexity as well.

Comment 5

[Nicos Gollan]

There MUST be an easily reachable option to disable audio and video content, and selectively allow it, e.g. like cookies. Any means of bringing animation and audio to the user will sooner or later be abused. Requiring third-party addons like ABP to do that job is NOT an option.

I do not think that it should be tied to images in general, but having a few extra checkboxes in Preferences/Content wouldn't kill anybody. "Load multimedia content automatically [Exceptions]" would be fine and very feasible, since media loading is not left to some third-party add-on.