Hi everyone, This isn’t the biggest issue, but it’s a bit concerning, and I’m hoping someone knows a solution.

I have my autoplay settings to block audio and video, with just the default exceptions. However, certain sites, such as https://youtubetranscript.com/ will autoplay videos anyway. (Try pasting a URL of a YouTube video in there and search, and the results will immediately start playing, which is aggravating and has actually disturbed people before when I forget that’s a thing that happens.)

I’ve done some searching, and checked about:config, but I think everything is okay in there.

I’ve also tested this in LibreWolf, where the exact same thing happened.

I also attempted to test it in Tor, but for some reason I am unable to connect to the Tor network right now.

I’m hoping I can find the root of the problem since clearly if it happens on this site, then it’s likely to happen on others, and I’d rather not have videos autoplaying when I expect them not to.

This may or may not happen in other browsers, but it’s still a Firefox issue, since Firefox presents us with a setting to disable autoplay, and one would expect it to work.

Edit: Bonus side note: The reason I couldn’t connect to Tor is the new version isn’t working. The solution is to downgrade to 12.5.3 and disable automatic updates for now. Bonus side note to my bonus side note: Turns out Microsoft flagged the latest version of Tor as a threat. Fuck Microsoft.

Edit: See solution by @[email protected] below

  • themoonisacheese
    7·
    1 year ago

    on a technicality this is not a bug. videos are allowed to play as a response to an event (and page loads, if you allow it) such as a click. the website is using your “blessed click event” from when you clicked search to play the video.

    this is because in general, websites load a new page on a search (can’t trigger autoplay), but this site does not and is therefore able to use your click event from the same page.

    • Mario_Dies.wav@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      Oh, I see. I did notice it behaves quite differently than most search features, so the ELI5 is it’s interpreting clicking “go” the same way as clicking “play.”

      I wonder if there’s any way around this. This is just one example, but I suspect there are other sites that would behave in such a way. Maybe there’s a uBlock filter? I’ll do some searching. Thanks for explaining, that makes a lot of sense how you explained it.