Firefox To Block Auto-Playing Audio Starting March 2019

An anonymous reader writes: Starting with Firefox 66 -- scheduled for release on March 19, 2019 -- Mozilla plans to block auto-playing audio on both desktop and mobile -- a feature it began to test on Nightly builds last year. The new rule will apply to any website that plays audio without user interaction in advance -- such as a user clicking a button. The audio autoplay ban will apply to both HTML5 audio and video elements used for media playback in modern browsers, meaning Firefox will block sound coming from both ads and video players, the most common sources of such abuse. Mozilla's move comes almost a year after Chrome took a similar decision to block all auto-playing sound by default with the release of Chrome 66 in April 2018. Microsoft similarly announced plans to block auto-playing sounds in Edge, but the feature never made it to production.

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