Video: How Mozilla plans to win back Firefox users
Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome, and even Microsoft’s Edge have already delivered, or are working on, options to allow users to block sound from autoplaying video, and now Mozilla’s Firefox is following suit.
As ZDNet sister site CNET spotted, Firefox Nightly, the pre-beta version of Firefox, now asks users whether they want a site to autoplay video with sound. Users can make that choice from the preferences page where there’s an option to ‘always ask’ before allowing a website to autoplay sound.
Dave Harvey, a developer at Mozilla, announced the new feature in a tweet on the weekend, showing that users will have the choice to ‘Allow Autoplay’, ‘Always Ask’, or ‘Block Autoplay’, as well as create exceptions for these choices.
Users can choose how they want to block autoplay sound in Firefox.
Image: Mozilla
To test the feature, download the Nightly version of Firefox and go to Preferences. Under permissions there’s a new field called ‘For websites that autoplay sound’. Videos with sound that are blocked will not play; those that autoplay with sound muted or have no audio will not be affected.
Microsoft for its part plans to introduce an autoplay block in the next version of Windows 10 aka Redstone 5, which is being tested with Windows insiders now and allows them to control autoplay permissions on a site-by-site basis. Testers with build 17713, released in July, can do this by…
