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Auto-Play Policy Changes for macOS
- dgfgfdagasdfgfa 9y agoThank god. This has made visiting news websites—say, your local fox channel—nearly unbearable, between the auto-playing ads and content. I can't imagine how people with small bandwidth go to sites these days without an ad blocker.
- rhizome 9y agoIt's the `blink` tag of the 21st century.
- yawz 9y agoAh! Good old days when we "blink"ed everything important. :)
- racl101 9y agoWait, so that's not cool anymore?
- AdmiralAsshat 9y agoThat's not completely true. It was a 50/50 split between the blink and the scrolling marquee.
- mnm1 9y ago21st century? This has been an issue for about two decades--since browsers first gained the ability to play sound--going well back to the '90's.
- lallysingh 9y agoDoes this include animated gif? If yes: then it's annoying. If no: annoying ads turn into animated gifs.
- sp332 9y agoIf the video does not have an audio track, it seems that it will be allowed. However, as you note, animated gifs are still pretty annoying and I think it would be nice if they were click-to-play as well.
- jernoble 9y agoYou can now change this setting either globally, or on a per-website basis in Safari Technology Preview 32: https://webkit.org/blog/7627/safari-technology-preview-32/ https://webkit.org/blog/7627/safari-technology-preview-32/ The options are: "Allow all Auto Play", "Stop Media with Sound" (the default), and "Never Auto Play". Site authors following the best practices section in the WebKit.org blog should provide a play button for video-backed-gifs when "Never Auto Play" causes automatic playback to block.
- panopticon 9y ago> However, as you note, animated gifs are still pretty annoying I think that comment actually says disabling autoplay on animated gifs would be annoying.
- laythea 9y agoI think the comment was saying 2 things: its bad because we loose GIF auto play facility and its bad because we will still have ads via GIFs. So basically, its a no win move for the consumer. However, my response would be to that would be: yes its bad if so, and if not, users can hopefully "throttle" its impact on our experience. IE. I would expect that the browser controls the parameters in which the GIF is "played" to maximize performance, or to suit user preference. E.g. Max number of frames, GIF size, looping etc
- filleokus 9y agoHow will this effect video backgrounds like Airbnb used to have?
- ohazi 9y agoI hope it breaks them. What a spectacular waste of bandwidth and energy.
- whytaka 9y agoAgreed. There's a concept that the cheaper and more plentiful a resource gets the more it gets wasted and thus, the resource will be scarce again. The "richness" of media today is often too thick for me to stomach. I don't know why people are so impressed or think it impresses people.
- dhritzkiv 9y agoRegarding bandwidth… what if the video is efficiently encoded to less than the file size of a high-quality PNG/JPEG (assuming the image was not optimized itself)? Artifacts in heavily compressed video files are often more acceptable than artefacts in highly compressed still JPEGs, IMO.
- minikites 9y agoPerhaps the correct answer is to have a solid color or similarly simple background. Aids in readability too.
- saidajigumi 9y agoFrom the "Best Practices for Web Developers" section: It’s worth pointing out that the new auto-play policies apply both to video used as a tool for making something visual happen (like background video or video-as-animated-gif) and also to video that serves as consumable content. We recommend web developers test their site with these new behaviors, ensuring any custom media controls behave correctly when auto-play is disabled, either automatically by Safari or by users. I.e. you now need to verify that your site still looks good and works well when background video auto-play has been denied.
- makecheck 9y agoWe're still talking about an environment that can execute practically any code. I'm sure the next thing advertisers will do is download 100 static images and animate them with scripts.
- phoboslab 9y agohttp://jsmpeg.com/ http://jsmpeg.com/ work nicely in Safari.
- btown 9y agoI mean, advertisers have been using GIFs since the early days of the web. The benefit here is that audio won't autoplay unexpectedly, which nobody ever wanted ever.
- dawnerd 9y agoAlternately they've overlay a transparent play button over the entire pay so the moment you click it counts as a "user action" and the video plays. Seen it happen on a few sites. They combine it with something like forbes uses with a "quote of the day" interstitial.
- askvictor 9y agoOr an opaque overlay with ' click here to read article' that also triggers the video
- vbernat 9y agoThe main point of the feature is to prevent sound. A muted video will pass the test.
- danaliv 9y ago"…users now have the ability to turn off all forms of auto-play, including silent videos." (Emphasis added.)
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- mschuster91 9y agoOn one side, I can certainly understand why Apple went with this, even if it drives me nuts that Safari@iOS can't do inline play at all (because it prevents nice artistic stuff using a canvas overlaid over a video element, for example), even if the play action is user-initiated. On the other hand it takes away a LOT of flexibility - seriously, I don't want to do 50MB GIFs for animated background or weird JS trickery when I can use a 2MB video for the same effect.
- jernoble 9y ago> ...it drives me nuts that Safari@iOS can't do inline play at all... Safari on iOS can now do inline playback! Just add a "playsinline" attribute to your <video> element: https://webkit.org/blog/6784/new-video-policies-for-ios/ https://webkit.org/blog/6784/new-video-policies-for-ios/
- dhritzkiv 9y agoAlso make sure to remove the audio track!
- eridius 9y agoThe default is to still auto-play silent movies (movies with no audio track or with the muted flag). If you're just using this for a background effect, the best solution is to just get used to the fact that for a minority of users, the video won't work and you'll have to fill in something else (don't use a 50MB GIF, just go with something non-animated!), but a majority of users will still get the silent video.
- kdecker 9y agoCorrect. A static image might be a good fallback for users who completely turn off all forms of auto-play. It's easy to detect auto-play is off and provide a graceful fallback.
- wsc981 9y agoWhen I am on my phone, having a monthly download limit of 2,5 GB after which my internet is cut off, I don't really want do download a 2 MB video at all.
- TheAceOfHearts 9y agoThis is a very user-friendly feature, kudos to Apple for making the change. I hope other browsers follow in their steps. I think every time I've encountered a website that autoplays video, it's been an annoyance. But maybe I haven't considered the topic with enough depth, what are examples of legitimate use-cases for autoplay video?
- atomwaffel 9y agoYouTube. Netflix.
- bwilliams18 9y agoWebsites I'd certainly whitelist.
- dgfgfdagasdfgfa 9y agoNot to mention it still seems much more user friendly to make this opt-in rather than opt-out.
- atomwaffel 9y agoOh, absolutely. I'd even expect them to be whitelisted by default (although that would pose the interesting problem of deciding which sites deserve the privilege of being whitelisted out of the box).
- wapz 9y agoUnfortunately if there is a "default" whitelist, it will become a "whoever pays $x money gets on the defaulted list." (I'm not referring to only Apple but if Chrome, Firefox, etc come out with the feature).
- toomanybeersies 9y agoYoutube autoplay is the devil. If you want to open some videos in several tabs, you have to individually pause every tab. It's a real pain. I'd much prefer it if Youtube autoplayed only when you switch over to the tab.
- ryanbertrand 9y agoHow does this affect YouTube, Twitch, Netflix?
- tuxracer 9y agoThey still have a "Play" button, no? It's possible there may be some whitelist as well.
- M4v3R 9y agoFTA: > Safari 11 also gives users control over which websites are allowed to auto-play video and audio by opening Safari’s new “Websites” preferences pane, or through the “Settings for This Website…” option in the Safari menu
- tuxracer 9y agoRight you have a way to manually whitelist sites on your own as well. But it wouldn't surprise me if that whitelist came preloaded with a number of legit video sites (netflix, youtube, etc...)
- coldpie 9y agoFirefox has had it for a while at media.autoplay.enabled. Unfortunately, like this article notes, this arguably breaks web standards and some websites behave poorly as a result. YouTube requires you to stop the not-yet-started video and then start it again to get it to play. And Google Play Music just straight up doesn't work. Hopefully Apple publicizing this will cause website devs to support it better, and it can be presented to the user as a legitimate option instead of a hack.
- cgtyoder 9y agoAny word on when this will get rolled out?
- gumby 9y agoA shame they don't block silent view too. Motion is a distraction (which is why advertisers use it, as if being distracted was what I wanted). This is why I mourned the death of Flash. Not installing flash made the web a much better place.