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Flash Block Addon Works but Sites Play Audio

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Somehow websites have figured out how to play audio even when the Flash object is blocked. This did not used to be the case and I only recently noticed they can sneak the audio through.

I have looked around other help sites but found no solution. I have a link of an example, below. Note: this link has audio that is particularly annoying and vacuous.

http://tvlistings.aol.com/listings/ga/columbus/over-the-air/31902

Somehow websites have figured out how to play audio even when the Flash object is blocked. This did not used to be the case and I only recently noticed they can sneak the audio through. I have looked around other help sites but found no solution. I have a link of an example, below. Note: this link has audio that is particularly annoying and vacuous. http://tvlistings.aol.com/listings/ga/columbus/over-the-air/31902

All Replies (3)

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Hi Chrislongski, my guess would be they are not using Flash.

Firefox has built-in HTML5 audio and video players. To see what audio formats Firefox can play, you can experiment with the following test page:

http://hpr.dogphilosophy.net/test/

Now... how can you stop autoplay of HTML5 audio? Maybe this setting:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button promising to be careful.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste autop and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the media.autoplay.enabled preference to switch the value from true to false

With that setting, you're likely to encounter something odd on video sites that autostart their videos (like YouTube): the player has a pause button, has started buffering, but isn't playing. To start the player, click pause, then click play.

Unfortunately, I don't know of a way to block only some kinds of media autoplay without an add-on (which you could try searching for in case there's something new up there).

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By the way, since sites playing unwanted audio are not that common, I find it more convenient to mute their tabs by clicking the little speaker icon that appears on the tab up on the tab bar. That way, I can leave autoplay on so video players behave normally.

See: Mute sound in Firefox tabs