Firefox Nightly Receives AutoPlay Controls to Disable Website Sounds

• An experimental feature has been added to the latest nightly edition of Firefox that allows users to control AutoPlay sounds on websites.
• A pop-up notification appears beside the URL on the address bar which allows users to control the sound options.
• Firefox is the third browser that allows users to block AutoPlay sounds after Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.

Mozilla released its latest nightly build for Firefox (v63.0a1), which brings new user control features to the popular web browser. The ability to block AutoPlay sounds from websites has been added to the browser, which does not allow pages to play any audio unless users manually allow it.

The nightly build of Firefox adds a new button which offers options similar to the pop-up manager on the web browser. The button appears once a page has been loaded and does not show up at all if the website does not have any audio elements. Mozilla Firefox has always blocked audio from advertisements by default, but the feature was not available for embedded webpage content until now.

Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome users already had access to AutoPlay controls before Firefox. With the latest update, Mozilla’s browser becomes the third web browser to offer website audio controls.

We are adding the ability to block and configure autoplaying videos with sound in Firefox, can check it out in @FirefoxNightly today (comments welcome) pic.twitter.com/k9K9hQC9Ye

— @dale@toot.cafe (@daleharvey) July 21, 2018

By default, all websites will have “Always Ask’ enabled on Firefox. Users can manually change it to “Allow AutoPlay” or “Block AutoPlay” if the browser notifies users that a page is trying to play audio. The feature was promised earlier this year when Mozilla published its feature roadmap for 2018. The new features from the nightly version should be available in the stable build of Mozilla Firefox 63 for all users once it releases.

Other features that are scheduled for release this year include web platform and tooling advancements to improve website performance as well as drag and drop support, notes support and hardware keyboard functionality for the mobile version of the web browser. Firefox will also be transitioning from WebView to GeckoView which will bring modern web technologies to the popular web browser.

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