Bug 190775 – Need Safari setting to allow autoplaying audio for web-platform-tests

• Status: NEW
• Component: Media

[Philip Jägenstedt]

A web-platform-tests infrastructure test I added in https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt/pull/13622 is failing in Safari because the audio element's paused attribute is still true immediately after calling `a.play()`.

There are a lot of tests in web-platform-tests written before autoplay restrictions were widespread, so to make these work a setting to disable these restrictions is needed. Something like the com.apple.Safari WebKitJavaScriptCanOpenWindowsAutomatically setting.

Testing with Safari TP 67.

[Jer Noble]

Philip, there is UI for enabling autoplay in Safari and STP. Preferences -> Websites -> Auto-Play -> "When visiting other websites": "Allow all auto-play". This can either be done globally for all websites, or you can add settings for each of the WPT domains.

[youenn fablet]

One possibility would be to expose this through Web Driver or scripting so that WPT infra could opt in that mode more easily.

Another approach is to rewrite tests in a way that autoplay is respected. For instance, a routine to call play() as part of a Web Driver click event callback.
Not sure how much tests are impacted.

[Philip Jägenstedt]

Jer, do you know if that setting is backed by something that can be written using defaults write com.apple.Safari ... ?

I tried changing the setting back and forth but can't observe any change in the output of `defaults read com.apple.Safari` or `defaults read com.apple.SafariTechnologyPreview`.

There are a bunch of Safari-only failures on wpt.fyi because of this and it would be nice to get those failures out of the way to see if there's something more interesting:
https://wpt.fyi/results/html/semantics/embedded-content/media-elements?run_id=5141852206399488&run_id=6579630693679104&run_id=5904569678692352

[Radar WebKit Bug Importer]

<rdar://problem/75495649>