For the last several years, I’ve been using mutetab, a Firefox extension which mutes new tabs by default. This changes the typical paradigm from “tabs can play audio by default” to “tabs need to be un-muted to play audio”.
I mostly needed this because of how many crappy websites around the web automatically play audio when opened, even in background. American news and media sites are a common offender (but definitely not the only ones): try to read an article and they’ll start automatically playing some unrelated video1.
Firefox has blocked auto-playing media for many releases now, and the feature has grown reliable enough that I no longer need mutetab. It’s definitely nice for a browser to provide this as a first-class feature, but I still wish we didn’t need to work around crap like this in the first place.
Playing videos with people talking on top of a new article is one of those things that make absolutely no sense to me: if a reader is reading your article, why would you make reading harder by playing a video of people talking about something? Whoever even considered this was a good idea? ↩︎