[+ owencm for notifications, ojan ani for intervention-y behavior]

This is indeed working as intended. The idea is that a tab isn't allowed to play in the background if it did not first play in the foreground.

+dalecurtis@, given that I believe you implemented this, what would you think of reducing the restriction to only require the page to have been in the foreground instead of playing something in the foreground? I think that this would solve the "open in a new tab" annoyance for website that would have bene whitelisted with media engagement without adding more noise to our autoplay rules. WDYT?

(+dahlke@ for autoplay)

I think it's probably okay, but note that it might be surprising to users. Every user discussion around this yields positive feedback, though it's mostly aimed at the open-defers type usage.

I totally get the desire to silence background tabs. Seems like a worthwhile feature that you might want to keep.

The "only if audio was previously played in foreground" is what leads to the suggestion in that StackOverflow post:

"The solution that worked for me was to play a small blank sound (0.1 second is enough) once the page is loaded. After that even if you switch to another tab, the tab in the background will still be able to play the sound on some external or internal event."

I'll try implementing this on our site as a workaround.

At which point I guess the question is, do we consider this the "right" solution for the platform? It seems, ah, rather kludgy. 

A few other options:

- make this a permission, like showing notifications
- say that the use case here is pretty narrowly notification alerts, and implement the "sound" components of the Notification API


Regardless of the decision there, I do sort of question the "defer playing audio until the tab gains focus" behavior. It makes sense for the popunder case, but for apps that try and fail to play a sound its very surprising user behavior to suddenly get this audio playing out of context. Are web app authors meant to somehow detect that the sound was deferred and cancel playback? Is there a way to do that?

Per mlamouri this is fixed with new autoplay policy launch.

Tom, please re-open if this is still an issue

Thanks y'all!