> people want firefox, when playing a video, to inhibit xscreensaver. "Monkey paw curls."
> Only problem is I'm not playing a video. Unfortunately, the net is full of > ads, so pretty much every page claims to be "playing a video". Yeah, that's awesome, isn't it? I had been under the impression that the bug you are describing only happened with Chromium, not with Firefox. Here's an excerpt from the tragically-long comment at the top of xscreensaver-systemd.c: * Twitter (and many other sites) auto-convert GIFs to looping MP4s to * save bandwidth. Chromium inhibits the screen saver any time a Twitter * GIF is on screen (either in the browser or in Tweetdeck). * * The proper way for Chrome to fix this would be to stop inhibiting once * the video loops. That way your multi-hour movie inhibits properly, but * your looping GIF only inhibits for the first few seconds. Firefox, Chrome and Chromium also all will leave the screen permanently inhibiited if they crash, too, which is great. And Firefox, Chromium and MPV inhibit screen blanking when only *audio* is playing, which makes no damned sense at all. So, if someone could report bugs against those applications, that would be great. Also, so that I'm clear on exactly what is happening, can you do a test with Firefox and see if what is going on is, in fact, that it treats any 2-second looping MP4 thumbnail as "playing a movie"? Finding any looping GIF on Twitter is a good way to test it. Then navigate away from that page and see if it uninhibits. I believe that Firefox didn't used to do this, so it would be interesting to know when they started. > I just want to be able to tell xscreensaver to ignore any calls from this > list of programs: > > 1) firefox-esr > > Oh look at that, end of list. Oh ho ho ho, the list of other programs that fuck this up is so much longer than that. It's basically all of them. Your best bet is probably just "rm xscreensaver-systemd". This will unfortunately have the side effect that your screen will not auto-lock when you close the laptop lid. > Yes, I know the proper fix is to tell firefox to give me an option to not > inhibit the screensaver That's not actually the fix, it's just that they are inhibiting it in the stupidest possible way. Maybe "be less stupid" will get more traction than "stop". We can dare to dream. -- Jamie Zawinski • jwz.org • dnalounge.com
