Flashblock no longer required

[patrickjdempsey]

As of Firefox 41.0/SeaMonkey 38.0, you can now disable HTML5 video autoplay. In about:config, search for:

media.autoplay.enabled and set to false.

This setting has been around for years, but it only applied to the HTML5 video player "autoplay" setting. Most websites have ignored standards-compliance and used JavaScript to force playing of HTML5 video. With this setting, you should no longer see HTML5 videos playing by themselves.

For Flash videos, you can use the Click-to-Play feature. In the Addons Manager go to the Plugins tab, find Flash Player or Shockwave Flash and select Ask To Activate. Unfortunately, in Firefox this setting is site-wide, while in SeaMonkey it is per-element (which is better for sites with multiple videos or for disabling advertisements).

[Lemon Juice]

I've tried it recently and unfortunately I find media.autoplay.enabled to be half-baked and no good. It does indeed stop autoplay but often it doesn't stop the buffering so the whole video may still eat my bandwidth even though it is not being played. For youtube this works more or less but youtube has already mechanisms that prevent buffering of the whole video (only a small portion) so it works in an acceptable manner there. But it is not always so on other sites that use their custom video players - it is not uncommon to have a player that with media.autoplay.enabled set to false pre-buffers the whole video and at the same time fails to provide any controls so that I am not able to play it even if I want to - which is completely insane!

Looking through the too long Bug 659285 it is clear that it is almost impossible to implement a click-to-play behaviour for all html5 players because each player is scripted differently and the risk of making them unusable is high. Which leads me to a sad conclusion that the html5 spec is flawed from the beginning because it doesn't take into consideration the need for click-to-play that will work regardless of a player. And now understandably, a browser like Firefox is not able to get into the maze of javascripts of each and every player out there to be able to provide it without breakage.

To me it was clear from the very beginning that it was only a matter of time that the generally available internet bandwidth would become good enough to handle streaming videos and all kinds of web sites would begin pushing their ads and videos playing whether we want it or not.

So at the moment I'm still searching for a way to really disable html5 autoplay that will work everywhere and not each my bandwidth uselessly. Is there an extension that can handle this?

[patrickjdempsey]

Actually, the spec has both autobuffer and autoplay *built-in*. That's the whole point of the preference. The problem is that YouTube and other websites aren't following the darn spec and using completely custom implementations that ignore standards.

http://shapeshed.com/examples/HTML5-video-element/

So if people actually bothered to follow the standards, it would work perfectly.

[Lemon Juice]

Actually, the spec has both autobuffer and autoplay *built-in*. That's the whole point of the preference. The problem is that YouTube and other websites aren't following the darn spec and using completely custom implementations that ignore standards.

http://shapeshed.com/examples/HTML5-video-element/

So if people actually bothered to follow the standards, it would work perfectly.

You are correct but this is only validating my point that the spec is flawed. It is not enough to make the autobuffer and autoplay built-in as optional features - the spec should make it clear that they are not guaranteed to work and browsers should follow that. They should both be first controlled by the user and not by the script. Only if the user allows autobuffer and autoplay should the script be able to use them. The user should have been put first in control and this should have been by design from the beginning.

[patrickjdempsey]

Just another reason why HTML5 video is largely a disaster IMO. But you can't force developers to care about the standards unless you punish them for breaking them. Firefox is hardly in that position, and I somehow doubt that Chrome devs are going to go against a sibling company.

[Lemon Juice]

But you can't force developers to care about the standards unless you punish them for breaking them.

But it's not web developers who are to blame for this situation even though they are violating the specs. It's as if you said that ATM's don't need any protections because users should follow the rules about how to use them, and if someone steals your money the bank has nothing to do with it. Bad guys will always exist. That's why the specs should be made such that a compliant browser will not auto-play or auto-buffer any media if not allowed to and this user choice should cause no issues with usability.

Theoretically, a browser could have a low level mechanism that buffers only a tiny portion of a video, displays the first frame and waits for some user action - for example, clicking a 'click-to-play' button. I don't know if an extension is powerful enough to do this. I'm still trying to find one that can provide an effective and usable click-to-play

[patrickjdempsey]

It is too bad that along with media.autoplay.enabled there isn't also a media.autobuffer.enabled setting as well. Of course the people who design this stuff aren't really worried about use cases involving people with limited connections or limited resources.

[Anonymosity]

What about the habit of HTML5 of using the lowest possible resolution? Flash at least uses the highest resolution just below HD. Is there any way of forcing a higher resolution to be used with HTML5?

[Lemon Juice]

What about the habit of HTML5 of using the lowest possible resolution? Flash at least uses the highest resolution just below HD. Is there any way of forcing a higher resolution to be used with HTML5?

This is not my experience at all, at least not on youtube. I always get the highest quality up to 1080p HD with html5. This was problematic in older SM versions before MSE were supported, which caused youtube to serve videos at max 720p (and this problem still remains in Pale Moon, which does not support MSE). Check if you have media.mediasource.enabled turned on.

[patrickjdempsey]

Much like how Firefox/SM h264 rendering on Windows uses Media Foundation which was introduced in Vista, h264 on OSX is rendered using Video Toolbox introduced in 10.7. So on YouTube both Windows XP and OSX 10.6 are delivered WebM video (which only comes in lower quality). On many other websites HTML5 video is just completely broken on XP and 10.6 because those sites don't even bother to offer any alternative other than h264.

To get high resolution h264 video in YouTube on OSX 10.6 or Windows XP you need to use the YouTube Flash Player extension:
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefo ... sh-player/
SeaMonkey: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/seamon ... eo-player/

Edit: it looks like there are some cases where Firefox/SM will render h264 on 10.6.3+, but only on some graphics cards: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1062654

[patrickjdempsey]

So long story short: HTML5 support on Mozilla browsers is spotty at best. And that's being polite.

[Anonymosity]

If I disabled media.mediasource.webm.enabled, what would happen? I am using YouTube Flash Video Player because Flash works better with YouTube than HTML5 does. Until I am convinced that HTML5 is worth using with YouTube, I shall keep on using Flash.

I am not convinced that I can get rid of Flashblock, since YouTube proved that it could override the media autoplay being disabled. If they can do that, other sites can also do it.

[patrickjdempsey]

Then the video would likely just fail. Try it and let us know! Mozilla hasn't really documented the support status for older systems (probably on purpose).

[4td8s]

well patrickjdempsey, what does Philip Chee (the creator of the Flashblock addon) think about Flashblock no longer being required for the latest SM & FF releases? I like to get HIS opinion on the matter.

I'm not getting rid of Flashblock anytime soon so I will still use it. perhaps til end of 2015 I may change my mind.
And I totally get what Lemon Juice has said here.

[patrickjdempsey]

It's just my opinion that it's no longer required. There are plenty of extensions that stick around after their primary features are integrated into Firefox/SeaMonkey just because users might prefer the way the extension does it, or the extension has more options. For me personally, I don't like having tons of extensions, and I really don't like videos playing by themselves.