Reply to post: Re: Autoplay

Re: Autoplay

media.autoplay.enabled = 0

Problem solved.

In Firefox and derivatives, anyway. Don't mention it too much though, or Mozilla will be reminded of one way that FF is still better than Chrome and "fix" it.

Then there's this:

"Most internet users have suffered from having sound blaring out from one browser tab while looking at a different one."

Yes, but you just look for the little speaker icon on the tab and click it to mute that tab. In Firefox, again.

So many people badmouth Firefox, but it still gives more control over annoyances than anything else out there. I know Mozilla is working hard to remove all features from FF that make it better, but FF is open source, so hope springs eternal: Maybe one of the FF derivatives will become the "default" version once people realize what Mozilla has done to their formerly great browser in version 57.

Chrome was built to a philosophy of, "We're Google, so we know the best way of doing everything. We're not going to give you any options, because the product is already configured ideally. If you don't agree, you're wrong, and the answer for that is not for us to change the product to suit you, but for you to stop being wrong."

Firefox was built to be the opposite. Its XUL addon system was powerful enough to allow the devs to remove popular features from the core product without alienating a lot of users. The core browser would be just the bits that everyone uses, with the less-used stuff made into addons, which (once installed) were functionally the same as if the code was included in FF itself.

Now Mozilla has forgotten everything it knew about browser design and is trying to be Chrome, even though the world already has a browser that is, by definition, the browser that will forever be the most Chrome-like browser possible. It's insanity for Moz to forsake their remaining user base and develop for the people that are already happy with Chrome, and in doing so go head to head with a corporate giant with many orders of magnitude more resources.

No matter what Mozilla does, I won't touch Chrome proper. Maybe someday some other browser that uses Chromium as a base will be decent, but none I have tested thus far even hold a candle to what I can do with pre-57 Firefox and its addon library. I won't be adopting FF 57+, unless they somehow include (into FF itself) all of the functionality I was going to add myself with my 20 some odd "legacy" addons. Given that so many of my addons are about undoing Mozilla mistakes (Australis, getting rid of the status bar, that kind of thing), it doesn't seem terribly likely.