Bug 233307 – [GTK] media autoplay deny does not always work

• Status: RESOLVED
• Resolution: DUPLICATE
• Component: WebKitGTK

[Milan Crha]

Moving thins from a downstream bug report:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/epiphany/-/issues/1639

I've epiphany-41.0-1.fc35.x86_64 and webkit2gtk3-2.34.1-2.fc35.x86_64. I do not know better pages, thus at least these. When I open https://finance.yahoo.com , then the lock icon menu in the address bar has "Deny" for everything, including Media Autoplay. However, when I Ctrl+click on an article link, which contains a video, then the video is started automatically. I see in the lock icon menu that the media autoplay is still disabled. When I open the link by writing the URL into the address bar, then the autoplay is not started, as expected. 

I thought the open in a new tab has its impact on this, but then I realized a simple non-Ctrl Click also ignores the media autoplay deny.

[antoyo]

From what I can see, a video will autoplay if it was already loaded in a previous page.

For instance, this website is good to test this: https://videojs.github.io/autoplay-tests/

On this video (https://videojs.github.io/autoplay-tests/plain/attr/autoplay.html), for instance, the first time it will not play automatically, but realoading the page (might) autoplay it.

[ronnb]

I am having the same issues. When I go into the settings for Safari and go to "websites/autoplay" and specify reddit.com to never autoplay. When I go into reddit.com, it automatically plays the videos. I'm using Safari 17.6 with WebKit 619.1.11.111.2

This happens with any browser that uses the webkit. I will set the site settings to never play and videos are played anyway. This happens on sites such as NYTimes.com and Reddit.

[Michael Catanzaro]

Milan, antoyo, your problem is very probably bug #259577. The WebKitWebsitePolicies API is misdesigned; there's just no way for Epiphany to use it properly for new tabs. I'll mark this as a duplicate.

ronnb, your problem is different. You'll need to create a separate bug report. This one is specific to Linux.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 259577 ***

[Michael Catanzaro]

(In reply to Michael Catanzaro from comment #3)
> Milan, antoyo, your problem is very probably bug #259577. The
> WebKitWebsitePolicies API is misdesigned; there's just no way for Epiphany
> to use it properly for new tabs. I'll mark this as a duplicate.

And yes, I suppose that bug is really the duplicate of this one, since you reported this much sooner. But I left all my commentary in bug #259577, so let's keep that one open.