Firefox will block media autoplay starting next month

Audible video/audio content that starts playing automatically is always annoying, even when it involves an interesting interview or your favorite song. Fortunately, Firefox will take care of this nuisance starting next month, when the release with version number 66 is scheduled to arrive.

Yesterday, Mozilla's software engineer Chris Pearce made the following announcement in a blog post: "Starting with the release of Firefox 66 for desktop and Firefox for Android, Firefox will block audible audio and video by default." He also revealed that muted autoplay will work and that Firefox for Android will have the existing block autoplay implementation replaced with the one that Mozilla will add to the desktop version of the browser.

Obviously, the user can choose to set autoplay permissions so certain websites can autoplay sound. Even more, the sites that already got camera/microphone permission from the user will keep working without any changes, delivering audio content as before.

Firefox 66 is scheduled to arrive on March 19 for all platforms. Mozilla's browser is currently available for Android, iOS, Linux, Windows 7 and later, as well as OS X 10.9 and later. However, the iOS version uses a different engine (WebKit instead of Gecko) and its version number is different, so next month's changes will only target the Android and desktop builds of the Firefox browser.