Firefox 66 arrives soon, and Mozilla is offering a tantalizing reason to upgrade: It blocks all autoplaying audio and video content.

“Ever open a new page and all of a sudden get bombarded with noise?” Mozilla’s Nick Nguyen writes in a new post to the firm’s corporate blog. “Well, worry no more. Starting next week, we will be rolling out the peace that silence brings with our latest feature, block autoplay.”

The ability to block autoplaying web content arrives with the release of Firefox 66 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android, along with other great new features like smoother scrolling, improved search, and extensions, and, on Windows 10, WebAuthn support for Windows Hello. Mozilla has also improved Firefox’s security warnings to make them clearer.

“When you’re on the web, you’re trying to get stuff done, and therefore online annoyances are just annoyances,” Mr. Nguyen continues. “Whether it’s autoplaying videos, page jumps, or finding a topic within all your multiple tabs, Firefox can help.”

You can find the latest release of Firefox on the Firefox website.

Tagged with Mozilla Firefox