Recommend Mozilla follow Chrome with audio blocking

[netdragon]

I'm a lead engineer in the online advertising industry and you'd think I'd be the last person to suggest this, however here goes: I'm asking you adopt Chrome's stance on auto-start audio (though maybe not copy the exact mechanism if there's ways to make it better for user): http://www.computerworld.com/article/29 ... audio.html

However, I only think that's a start. Chrome's solution is insufficient to solve the problem at large. The reality is that "bad actors" (advertisers that don't think about consequences) will continue to drive up prices of auto-start audio ads by bidding only on them until browsers do what is necessary to eliminate the penalty to "good actors". That means annoying audio even on pages in the foreground. Such as happens on Space.com currently, even for players that are part of their content (but weren't specifically requested by user). Based on complaints to advertisers from publishers, it seems they have become increasingly overt in their disregard for good user experience, and decisions are money driven from the brand without even the consideration of how negatively it impacts the brands' perceptions. It may ultimately be an issue the industry solves on its own someday, but I expect years more of pain before that happens. Things haven't been this bad with regards to audio in ads for over 10 years.

Advertisers also have access to "viewability" information about whether a tab is active or not, so blocking in a background tab can be priced into the ad price, meaning that foreground tabs can continue to annoyingly auto-start audio. Problem only partially solved.

I don't think you'll get as much resistance from the industry about taking an aggressive stance on audio as you did for things like the cookie-blocking. Many ad networks, publishers, vendors and others will be relieved about not having to police audio anymore. You'll probably get resistance from the brands and advertisers themselves but then you may be able to educate them on how their behavior actually gives a negative impression of the brands. You can also argue that the industry has failed to self-police audio in the last couple years.

I'll follow this background with my suggestions.

Background

I've personally gotten tired of doing everything I can to possibly detect "bad actors" in the advertising industry that turn on audio in our own solutions, with some success. However, there are limits to what I can do. There isn't always a technical solution to solve it in each case, especially with the emergence of more "HTML5 ads" (ads that use the <video> or <audio>). Note that I'm using the term "ad" very generally to mean anything from ad network players to ads themselves. Policing scripts in Flash could poll global volume and counter the changes or rip them out (and justify it by such ads breaking the IAB standards). However, with the advent of HTML5 ads, all the ad has to do is place itself in a non-friendly iframe and then "policing scripts" can't access them. Even if "policing scripts" could, the best we can do is poll. Polling can lead to audio blips. Finding all video/audio elements across the DOM is also an expensive operation.

Even in a Flash-only experience, ads can break out into HTML5 and do harm that way. Players can't block this using allowscriptaccess because ad networks need to be able to check the domain they are running on for all kinds of reasons including making sure that blacklisted domains are not provided ads.

Suggested approach

I suggest approaching this in a few ways:
1. Start showing audio status icon in the tabs the way Chrome does and also blocking auto-start audio in background tabs the way Chrome is planning to. Also, for blocked audio, show an audio icon in tab with a red line through it.
2. However, I think in foreground tabs, you should auto-block audio as well, and provide a notification bar that allows users to whitelist/blacklist sites from auto-start audio. E.g. on a game site, user would probably whitelist site. Game site could provide instructions how to do that.
3. Said notification bar should have an audio mute/unmute that affects all sessions on that tab for the site (domain). This is a short-cut for turning it on in each player. No slider is needed since the OS can manage the actual volume level. Without a user specifically whitelisting, FF should assume users were only temporarily turning on auto-start audio.
4. Provide programmatic changes to help publishers police audio changes. Even when a user whitelists the site only for practical reasons, they may continue to to get annoyed by ads. Publishers should be able to control the experience for their users, not advertisers. E.g. IAB VPAID specifically gives control of audio to publishers in video player, and that interpretation can be applied elsewhere outside of VPAID.
4a. Event listeners for audio changes, so that "policing" scripts don't have to poll. Polling can lead to audio blips if a "policing" script changes audio back. In event, indicate whether change was user-initiated or programmatic
4b. Provide a document.volumeProperties collection or something similar that at minimum provides access to volume settings and events in all iframes (but doesn't break the general concept of cross-frame security - e.g. they can't get the url of the video/audio)
- This could be an audio and video collection (much like iframes) but block most properties except volume-related properties for elements inside of iframes that normally wouldn't be accessible by main page.


Feel free to bring up concerns. I imagine this will evoke some discussion.

[JayhawksRock]

tl,dr,,,
feedback to Mozilla is here > https://input.mozilla.org/en-US/feedback/firefox/
FWIW, you have been around here to know we are not Mozilla

mozillaZine is an independent Mozilla community and advocacy site. We're not affiliated or endorsed by the Mozilla Corporation but we love them just the same.

[LIMPET235]

Hi,
For a start, "we" cannot do anything about what "goes in/on" in Firefox.
"We" are just a user-to-user help site. Please ref; the bottom of the right hand column. --------------------------->>>

May I suggest that you try asking "them" via, Help > Submit Feedback.

[netdragon]

Done.

[LIMPET235]

Good luck with your re-quest.
Locking this to stop the spammers.