On: Facebook's new chief security officer wants to set a date to kill Flash

[vezycash]

My main issue with the kill-flash cult is auto playing html5 videos. I've asked multiple times on HN and have not gotten a working answer.

How can I block HTML5 videos and audios or at least stop them from playing automatically?

[mkddrm → vezycash]

Starting in September with Firefox 41 you can set media.autoplay.enabled to False in about:config and stop them from playing automatically.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=659285

[1ris → vezycash]

Noscript for firefox has a click-to-play feature for Html5 audio and video.

[JoshTriplett → vezycash]

For YouTube, there are several click-to-play extensions that work with the HTML5 player. There's a Firefox preference media.autoplay.enabled that works for most HTML5 video other than YouTube; ideally that could be allowed on a per-site basis. For ads, use an ad blocker; they know how to block HTML5 ads just fine.

[chejazi]

Particularly for mobile, the latest video-ad rendering is happening in JS [0]. This is because autoplay video is disabled by default on mobile, but video rendering in ASM JS / WebGL bypasses such restrictions. Yahoo [1] is doing this, for instance.

[0] https://github.com/brion/ogv.js

[1] https://hpto.yahoo.com/review/mobile/npte/a-haunted.html

[mike-cardwell]

You don't need JavaScript to autoplay video or audio on a webpage:

  <video src="url" autoplay>

  <audio src="url" autoplay>

[JoshTriplett]

The syntax in the comment you replied to works fine: just include a video tag that references the video file by URL.

[toddmorey → vezycash]

The fact that it's hard to turn off autoplay in most browsers without a plugin is really sad. We really had a chance to get it right.