Autoplay 0

Automatically starting the playback of audio (or videos with audio tracks) immediately upon page load can be an unwelcome surprise to users. While autoplay of media serves a useful purpose, it should be used carefully and only when needed. In order to give users control over this, browsers often provide various forms of autoplay blocking. In this guide, we'll cover autoplay functionality in the various media and Web Audio APIs, including a brief overview of how to use autoplay and how to work with browsers to handle autoplay blocking gracefully.

Autoplay blocking is not applied to

The term autoplay refers to any feature that causes audio to begin to play without the user specifically requesting that playback begin. This includes both the use of HTML attributes to autoplay media as well as the user of JavaScript code to start playback outside the context of handling user input.

That means that both of the following are considered autoplay behavior, and are therefore subject to the browser's autoplay blocking policy:

<audio src="/music.mp3" autoplay>

and

The following web features and APIs may be affected by autoplay blocking:

• The HTML
• The Web Audio API

From the user's perspective, a web page or app that spontaneously starts making noise without warning can be jarring, inconvenient, or off-putting. Because of that, browsers generally only allow autoplay to occur successfully under specific circumstances.

As a general rule, you can assume that media will be allowed to autoplay only if at least one of the following is true:

• The audio is muted or its volume is set to 0
• The user has interacted with the site (by clicking, tapping, pressing keys, etc.)
• If the site has been allowlisted; this may happen either automatically if the browser determines that the user engages with media frequently, or manually through preferences or other user interface features
• If the autoplay feature policy is used to grant autoplay support to an