Firefox for Android gives you lots of options for playing video and audio on your phone, including background playback, picture-in-picture support and auto-play settings.
Table of Contents
Picture-in-picture mode
Picture-in-picture mode lets you continue watching a video from a website while visiting other tabs. You can even continue watching the video while using other apps.
- Start the video and switch to full-screen mode.
- While the video is playing, press the home button on your phone. The video will resize and you'll be able to view it while using other sites or apps.
Device settings: If this feature doesn't work, check your device settings to make sure you've allowed picture-in-picture mode in Firefox.
Enabling and disabling video autoplay
If Firefox blocks the autoplay of a video on a site, you will see a blue dot on the lock icon in the address bar.
Tap this icon to change view the settings for that site. Click Block audio and video and select the option for autoplay you want to use.
You can visit Settings to change autoplay settings to Firefox for Android from automatically playing videos/audio when you visit a website. This helps you save battery life too.
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Tap the menu button.
- Tap Settings.
- Tap Site permissions.
- Tap Autoplay.
- Choose your preferred option:
- Block audio and video on cellular data only: Audio and video will still autoplay on Wi-Fi.
- Block audio only: Video will autoplay without sound.
- Block audio and video: Prevents autoplay of both audio and video.
Change autoplay settings for specific websites
You can change site permissions to allow video autoplay only in your trusted websites.
- Tap Settings.
- Tap Site permissions.
- Tap Exceptions
- Tap the name of the website to see its current permissions and to make changes.
Additionally, you can quickly change autoplay settings for a specific website from the Toolbar where you can modify permissions for a given website from a dropdown list.
Listen to videos in the background
If you minimize Firefox while playing video/audio, it will continue to play in the background, so you can multitask on your phone.
Control media playback through your notifications panel
When you play a video or audio, controls will appear in your notifications panel so you can control playback there -- without having to open Firefox.
See and stop noisy tabs
Your Open Tabs section in the Firefox for Android home screen will show you whether or not any tabs are playing audio or video, along with a pause button, so you can stop playing it without opening the page.
