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In fairness, wouldn’t that have less to do with custom behavior and more to do with the limited size of a phone’s screen? Seems that Apple is just trying to av

In fairness, wouldn’t that have less to do with custom behavior and more to do with the limited size of a phone’s screen? Seems that Apple is just trying to avoid ridiculous scaling and making a reasonable judgment call.

rocky1138 11y ago
It's unreasonable since <video> is a standard embedded media tag from w3c. If the user wants to see the video in full-screen they can click the full-screen icon in the player.
- adrusi 11y ago
  IIRC for a while apple wasn't even letting native apps use their own video player chrome. Considering how awful the experience of using embedded video players is on android (on chrome and Firefox mobile at least), I'm not surprised apple decided it would be better for users to force an actually OK video player. It has its disadvantages I'm sure, like when webms are used as animated gif substitutes. But on android I have to go through extra steps to use an external video player. Even on desktop I use a youtube-dl/mpv setup to watch web videos in an external player. If that's the worst spec violation example you can come up with then your argument is weak.
aeharding 11y ago
My $30 Windows Phone plays 720p <video> elements I've embedded in websites as a background flawlessly. Safari Mobile screws with the standard [1]. (The argument for preserving bandwidth is moot, you shouldn't mess with the standard. It even adds a giant play button on the video and allows clicking to play it, as if pausing wasn't bad enough.) On another note, IMO, Safari has the worst support for printing webpage elements to scale. IE 9 is actually great for printing support. Browsers suck at this in general -- have you tried printing a 2cm square (in the physical world) cross browser and page size? Really difficult. Not to mention as the article says, support for IndexedDB that isn't completely broken and Workers. It seems like every time I create a webpage or webapp I have to fix it on Safari. These are just a few annoying examples I've encountered in day-to-day work. IMO, a larger problem with Chrome is it randomly regressing and breaking crap before fixing it in the next release. [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12496144/can-you-autoplay-html5-videos-on-the-ipad http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12496144/can-you-autoplay...
- iSnow 11y ago
  Actually I am very happy Safari Mobile does not support autoplay. I have disabled it on my desktop Firefox as well. In a perfect world, it would be a valuable feature. In a world governed by the attention economy, it invites abuse. If I wanted to have websites come on all blaring sound at full volume and distract me with video playing, I'd buy an $50 Android tablet.
Chris_Newton 11y ago
In fairness, wouldn’t that have less to do with custom behavior and more to do with the limited size of a phone’s screen? As someone who builds a video-based site often used on mobile devices: I don’t think that really matters. Not all sites using HTML5 video elements are just wrapping a single video in a player and some supporting content, the way you see on sites like YouTube or Vimeo. There are numerous applications for video where that content is integrated with other content on the page and not the only star of the show. There are standards for how HTML elements are supposed to work, and work together. And Apple is completely ignoring those standards in this case, which makes it literally impossible to provide the kinds of presentation styles and UIs we should be able to for visitors using iPhones.

rocky1138 11y ago

It's unreasonable since <video> is a standard embedded media tag from w3c. If the user wants to see the video in full-screen they can click the full-screen icon in the player.

adrusi 11y ago
IIRC for a while apple wasn't even letting native apps use their own video player chrome. Considering how awful the experience of using embedded video players is on android (on chrome and Firefox mobile at least), I'm not surprised apple decided it would be better for users to force an actually OK video player. It has its disadvantages I'm sure, like when webms are used as animated gif substitutes. But on android I have to go through extra steps to use an external video player. Even on desktop I use a youtube-dl/mpv setup to watch web videos in an external player. If that's the worst spec violation example you can come up with then your argument is weak.

aeharding 11y ago

My $30 Windows Phone plays 720p <video> elements I've embedded in websites as a background flawlessly. Safari Mobile screws with the standard [1]. (The argument for preserving bandwidth is moot, you shouldn't mess with the standard. It even adds a giant play button on the video and allows clicking to play it, as if pausing wasn't bad enough.) On another note, IMO, Safari has the worst support for printing webpage elements to scale. IE 9 is actually great for printing support. Browsers suck at this in general -- have you tried printing a 2cm square (in the physical world) cross browser and page size? Really difficult. Not to mention as the article says, support for IndexedDB that isn't completely broken and Workers. It seems like every time I create a webpage or webapp I have to fix it on Safari. These are just a few annoying examples I've encountered in day-to-day work. IMO, a larger problem with Chrome is it randomly regressing and breaking crap before fixing it in the next release. [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12496144/can-you-autoplay-html5-videos-on-the-ipad http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12496144/can-you-autoplay...

iSnow 11y ago
Actually I am very happy Safari Mobile does not support autoplay. I have disabled it on my desktop Firefox as well. In a perfect world, it would be a valuable feature. In a world governed by the attention economy, it invites abuse. If I wanted to have websites come on all blaring sound at full volume and distract me with video playing, I'd buy an $50 Android tablet.

Chris_Newton 11y ago

In fairness, wouldn’t that have less to do with custom behavior and more to do with the limited size of a phone’s screen? As someone who builds a video-based site often used on mobile devices: I don’t think that really matters. Not all sites using HTML5 video elements are just wrapping a single video in a player and some supporting content, the way you see on sites like YouTube or Vimeo. There are numerous applications for video where that content is integrated with other content on the page and not the only star of the show. There are standards for how HTML elements are supposed to work, and work together. And Apple is completely ignoring those standards in this case, which makes it literally impossible to provide the kinds of presentation styles and UIs we should be able to for visitors using iPhones.