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Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

670 points by piyushgupta27 9y ago

Ajedi32 9y ago
Technical details: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/audio-video/autoplay https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/audio-video/auto...
stewartjarod 9y ago
Finally, we are past the 90's fad of auto-playing crap on page load... thanks, Chrome.
outsidetheparty 9y ago
It's a start. Allowing users to disable autoplay altogether would be better, but shutting down the audio is better than nothing. It's a shame that browsers increasingly have to actively defend against website behavior, instead of just being tools for displaying those websites; but, well, here we are.
- msla 9y ago
  Autoplay music was in for a while, went out, then came back in, from what I recall: Back in the 1990s, it was MIDI files on the stereotypical Geocities page, or completely hand-made pages, and that went out in a massive design backlash against those kinds of sites. Now, it's coming back in the form of autoplay video on news sites, for example, which would have been impossible in the dial-up era. So this isn't a new thing, it's an old one that's come back. Annoying people have always been annoying.
  - outsidetheparty 9y ago
    Yeah, I guess you're right. Seems like back in the day it wasn't nearly as pervasive, you'd know to expect a terrible MIDI track if you hit somebody's MySpace page but generally didn't need to worry about it elsewhere -- but maybe that's rose-colored nostalgia speaking. (I've never used the phrases "rose-colored nostalgia" and "MySpace" in such close proximity before)
    - icebraining 9y ago
      MySpace can a bit later than what msla is referring to.. in fact, the MySpace period (mid 2000s) may have been the best in this regard, as the amateur site makers were increasingly people who didn't know HTML and used more restricted tools like Blogger, but the bandwidth for pervasive video wasn't around yet.
  - loeg 9y ago
    It was also somewhat popular in the 2000s on Myspace.
  - wlesieutre 9y ago
    >Annoying people have always been annoying. But it increases engagement!!! I'm happy to see these changes coming.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      "Engagement" is one of those words, like "value-add", that mean someone is trying to fuck you over.
    - msla 9y ago
      Ad tech is indistinguishable from toddlers who haven't learned the difference between good attention and bad attention.
      - wlesieutre 9y ago
        Is not that they haven't learned, it's that even if you're pissed at an advertisement or whatever other annoying thing they did, at least you're looking at it. And will probably remember it. That's what's important!
        nhtaoe78th2 9y ago
        Hence ad blockers and advertisers crying over browser makers reducing the ability to track users.[0] [0]http://www.adweek.com/digital/every-major-advertising-group-is-blasting-apple-for-blocking-cookies-in-the-safari-browser/ http://www.adweek.com/digital/every-major-advertising-group-...
        danso 9y ago
        I agree that it's possible that annoying ads do work for advertisers. Just like super-expensive Super Bowl ads bring in a good return on investment even if I think I already like Coca-Cola enough to not need to see another commercial. But the ads could be both beneficial for one party (the advertiser, and/or the brand) while being hugely terrible for the host. I'm a news junkie but I actively do not go to CNN.com. Not just I don't visit its front page, but will just ignore any content that's being shared from that domain because I know the ad/video-junk consistently ruins my ability to consume (and enjoy) the content, no matter how great or important it might be.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- aclelland 9y ago
  It appears that there is already a feature in Chrome for Android which allows this. It will be removed around the same time as this patch to make things more 'consistent' >Removing the block autoplay setting that is currently available on Chrome for Android
  - Frank2312 9y ago
    I did not know there was an option for this. I have now enabled it. Thanks
- andybak 9y ago
  > It's a shame that browsers increasingly have to actively defend against website behavior, You make this sound like a new trend but it was always thus. Didn't you live through the 90s before pop-up blockers were built in to browsers? Not to mentionvarious abusive plugins, attempts to trick you into installing toolbars, the hell that was RealPlayer, rewriting your history to prevent 'back', etc etc.
  - outsidetheparty 9y ago
    ah phooey just let me have my totally unwarranted nostalgia for imaginary better days gone by
    - 0xfeba 9y ago
      I wish we lived in a place more like the America of yesteryear that only exists in the brains of us Republicans. - Ned Flanders
  - nix0n 9y ago
    You're right, but the arms race has marched on. HTML5 has increased the amount of work I have to do, I miss the days when Flashblock was all I needed. (I would love to be wrong about this, please show me an HTML5 blocker with a site-based whitelist.)
    - andybak 9y ago
      Not quite clear on what a "HTML5" blocker is. I'm guessing you don't literally mean "block HTML5"...
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  It looks like they're also going to add a new permission for audio: https://plus.google.com/photos/photo/100132233764003563318/6458153465994765378 https://plus.google.com/photos/photo/100132233764003563318/6... It's allowed by default, but I imagine you can change that in settings as with all other permissions. That way you could have a whitelist of sites that are allowed to play audio.
MBCook 9y ago
> The content is muted, or does not include any audio (video only) Sigh. So no surprise audio but nothing to stop the trend of silent video ads or (even worse) muted live TV? How about NO auto playing live video or files over 250k? Don't waste my bandwidth streaming stuff I'm not trying to watch.
- giancarlostoro 9y ago
  I really want no auto playing of any multimedia. I wish browsers didn't support this functionality at all. The user should not ever be forced to do / go through something he does not expect to happen.
  - loeg 9y ago
    I think it's ok for specific video pages on multimedia-first sites, like Youtube. (I'm not a fan of autoplay when you go to a page with multiple results, such as a creator's page.) That's about it, though.
    - giancarlostoro 9y ago
      Like I said, it's fine if it's expected.... If it's the ONLY video in the whole page, and it's the main set of content.
      - icebraining 9y ago
        Right, but how would the browser tell which is the main set of content?
        lamontcg 9y ago
        Let me control it. Be dumb and stupid and off by default, and if I want to watch videos on a site, I'll enable it.
        Dylan16807 9y ago
tweakz 9y ago
This, along with Google's plans to integrate an ad blocker into Chrome (mentioned at the end of the article), add up to Chrome's team seriously looking to clean up its act.
danso 9y ago
Autoplay seems to be something universally reviled and yet the trend seemed to be that enough people tolerated it to make advertisers and sites double down on it: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/19/facebook-users-complain-autoplaying-videos-sound-how-to-turn-it-off https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/19/facebook-... > During Facebook’s announcement of the feature in February, product manager Dana Sittler and engineering manager Alex Li said: “As people watch more video on phones, they’ve come to expect sound when the volume on their device is turned on.” > *"After testing sound on in News Feed and hearing positive feedback, we’re slowly bringing it to more people.” Likely Chrome's feature won't affect FB given how much FB is on mobile but I'm interested in how media sites, such as CNN, will be impacted. Seems like they've become dependent on throwing up an annoying newscast video (with post-roll ads) for every article. Many times unrelated.
- drewg123 9y ago
  I've pretty much stopped going to CNN because of this. I have managed to block a lot of this video by using privacy badger and blocking the underlying CDNs where it is played from. However, I've never been able to block CNN effectively, so I've just given up on them.
  - lamontcg 9y ago
    Newsweek's autoplay is literally cancer. I've got the disable HTML5 autoplay, but the newsweek site is so aggressive about autoplaying that it bugs out the browser.
    - drewg123 9y ago
      The "just read" chrome extension seems to work pretty well at stopping media playback for Newsweek.
  - astronautjones 9y ago
    They're really bad about it. But I recently discovered that they offer this service: http://lite.cnn.io/en http://lite.cnn.io/en I really wish washington post, nyt, etc would offer something similar, and really miss the days where everyone had wap versions available
RUG3Y 9y ago
A step in the right direction.
camus2 9y ago
I'm not sure why all these websites decided that auto-playing video is a good thing. It's annoying as hell. I click on an article for reading, I'm not clicking on a youtube playlist. The latest craze among web designers being videos that follow the reader even when they are scrolling down the page! Enough! Can we have a designer here explaining why they do this? If it's about engagement, i'm not going back to your website if you do that to me once.
- danso 9y ago
  That scrolly-video you refer to, I wonder if it was an evolutionary response to ad blockers basically shutting down pup-up ad video. So the justification would probably be "the bottom line"
- exodust 9y ago
  If the video follows you down the page in a paused state, with thumbnail and "play" icon, would this be okay? The video that follows you down the page is trying to help you, not annoy you. It gives you the chance to read the article while having the vision there too. It's only a problem if the video autoplays, which unfortunately is all of the time on all sites that do this.
  - JoshTriplett 9y ago
    > If the video follows you down the page in a paused state, with thumbnail and "play" icon, would this be okay? Absolutely not. If the video is useful content, put it front and center, and let the user hit "play" on it; if they scroll it away, accept that they don't want it. If it's unrelated content (as with the thousands of "news" sites that want to autoplay an unrelated "hey look at this completely unrelated garbage" video), put it under a "related stories" column or similar, and stop making it jump around the page to draw attention. The user is already on the page they wanted, their attention is exactly where they want it to be, and your job is to serve them what they want, not what you want. "Engagement" might be easy to measure (hey look, if we pester the hell out of users we get a few more users who accidentally watched the video), but the much better metric for long-term sustainability is "how many users love your site and think 'this is awesome'".
stablemap 9y ago
This will be in Safari 11 too: https://webkit.org/blog/7734/auto-play-policy-changes-for-macos/ https://webkit.org/blog/7734/auto-play-policy-changes-for-ma...
- javajocky 9y ago
  In Safari it auto-blocks ALL video, not just with sound.
  - amiga-workbench 9y ago
    Isn't that only on mobile? I've had to push back on looping video backgrounds from designers far too many times to count.
artursapek 9y ago
Doesn't YouTube technically autoplay videos? Is this going to disable that?
- danso 9y ago
  The design document talks about applying a heuristic to determine which sites are expected by users to play video: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJLg14Ogf-ekAFNymAJoU/mobilebasic https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJ... > The Media Engagement Index (MEI) aims to provide a metric reflecting the engagement of a given user with regards to media playback on a given origin. The intent of this metric is to allow websites scoring high enough to be able to bypass the new unified autoplay policy, thus reducing the cost on the ecosystem.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    So, all existing pages get a bonus over new websites? That’s also suboptimal.
    - danso 9y ago
      Hasn't that been the case since Google's, aka BackRub's, very birth?
  - ravenstine 9y ago
    Ugh, that sounds dreadful. Doesn't this prevent anyone besides YouTube and a handful of other sites from establishing themselves as video hosting sites? Besides that, adding another hard-to-predict layer to the web is just... bleh. We shouldn't need heuristics to make the web a nice place to be. Boycotts on website should start becoming a regular thing. I simply don't return to websites that pull shenanigans like autoplaying videos on scroll. If I must, I use archive.is so that crap gets stripped out and I don't give them a genuine hit.
    - Dylan16807 9y ago
      It kicks in once the user visits a site 5 times. Nothing that really favors big sites. I have no idea what to do about the hundreds of gotchas around html/css/javascript.
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
>Chrome will only autoplay a given piece of content when the media won’t play sound or the user has indicated an interest in the media. I wonder if a certain "Tube" site will have "indicated interest" on by default, hmm...
- izzydata 9y ago
  Probably. I can't imagine the point of going to a youtube page that is solely dedicated to a video and having no intention of watching or listening to it. I wouldn't be opposed to being required to click play though.
  - wolfgang42 9y ago
    > I can't imagine the point of going to a youtube page that is solely dedicated to a video and having no intention of watching or listening to it. When you click a notification of a comment reply, it takes you to the video page, jumps down to the comment, and then starts playing the video. This means you have to scroll up, pause the video, then scroll back down to read the comment in peace.
    - izzydata 9y ago
      Good enough reason for me to keep it muted and / or paused.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    I wonder how this will affect YouTube playlists, though.
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  Not by default, but I imagine most YouTube users will have a high enough Media Engagement Index to allow it: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJLg14Ogf-ekAFNymAJoU/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJ...
amelius 9y ago
As much as I like this idea, I'm sure that this will also cause problems in certain cases. Therefore, I'd like to see per-website "capability settings", just like you can allow smartphone-apps to access your microphone, camera, et cetera. And an API for websites to determine which capabilities they have, and an API to request the browser to ask the user to add a capability.
- benjaminjackman 9y ago
  With an always veto by default option, similar to the way pop up windows are blocked / handled. I much prefer seeing the little red x over a window icon in the location bar that I can click on in my own time than the modal drop down "this site wants to send you notifications" thing that I have to deal with right away, especially since I am always going to say 'no thanks' to the notifications and almost certainly autoplay as well.
ilamont 9y ago
It's a war for attention, and ultimately, money. If sites can't autoplay video with sound, they'll switch to more of the junk videos that make it onto Facebook (muted by default, I believe), which include giant captions or other distracting elements.
polygot 9y ago
What about YouTube? I'm sure they'll add an exception for it, but it technically does classify as automatically playing a video when you click on a link.
- exodust 9y ago
  Just allow it for youtube, while keeping everything else blocked. Whitelisting is the best option because there aren't that many websites primarily about playing video. Nobody goes to Youtube for other activities. Clicking a video link means you intend watching. News websites are the worst. Clicking a news article means I want to read the article, not watch a video. If I want to watch the video on a news website (rare) I will press play. If they autoplay videos, I send them nasty angry feedback and don't return if I can help it.
  - franga2000 9y ago
    Whitelisting is about the worst thing you could do. It makes any kind of competition and therefore inovation on the web impossible and under the vendor's control. Simply ask the user to allow autoplay, same as you would with mic or camera permissions.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  I would prefer that YouTube not autoplay. So I hope they make sote-settings (like with JS) and we can both have our way.
k3oni 9y ago
Auto-playing crap bugs the hell out of me. Some news sites do it as well even when you go and Pause the player, it will go on and play ahead after a few seconds. Started using "Disable HTML5 Autoplay"[1] extension in Chrome and works great. I wish every browser would stop sound and video by default until i hit Play or have a setting for that. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-autoplay/efdhoaajjjgckpbkoglidkeendpkolai?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-auto...
- otalp 9y ago
  Safari is going to stop Autoplay by default in High Sierra
- koonsolo 9y ago
  That's what you get when you don't clearly separate text content from multimedia. With HTML5 it's all mixed together. And now you end up with text content full of annoying interactions, and crippled down multimedia functionality.
- andrewfong 9y ago
  I find the extension rather unreliable actually. There are a lot of sites (e.g. Twitter embeds) where turning off autoplay also seems to break manually clicking play as well (forcing me to temporarily disabled the extension and reload page).
  - gaius_baltar 9y ago
    > There are a lot of sites (e.g. Twitter embeds) where turning off autoplay also seems to break manually clicking play as well Pretty sure this is by design, as Twitter wants that content to auto-play. Forcing a poor experience for people who use blockers and making us white-list their domain seems a suitable strategy. It's something like Facebook chat in mobile mode. Facebook wants its cattle to install that spyware-ridden messenger, so first they disable chat/messenger in the mobile site (not sure they already killed it, last time I checked there was only a warning; need to create a new bunch of test accounts to check again). As people will fight the change by using desktop-mode in mobile (one of the best features of Firefox for Android), they have a incentive to make the desktop site intentionally unusable in touch devices.
j_s 9y ago
Devil's advocate / counterpoint: https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/908675882587484160 https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/908675882587484160 My complaint here is that Google is making things worse for media/game pages by making life good for people reading web content proper
- CJefferson 9y ago
  If you interact with the element it can play sound, so games will just be silent until you first click on them.
- fish_fan 9y ago
  I mean, "worse" here is really a relative term when it's so easy to re-enable for a page. I can't say i'm empathetic when i mostly see stupid autoplayed news clips and car ads.
- koonsolo 9y ago
  And this one: "What's interesting here is how what this really demonstrates is that Flash really was exactly what we wanted". With HTML5, who didn't see annoying JavaScript popups and autoplay videos coming? Seriously. If you think about the web, think about 2 things: 1. Text content 2. Multimedia content People complaining about Flash always used arguments for nr 1. For me, I want my text content to be really static text content, and my multimedia content to be boxed-in multimedia. HTML4 and Flash were good at that. Now you have a mix of both: 1. Text content with annoying interactions 2. Crippled multimedia content (think about the terrible way iOS handles audio for HTML5 games. Expect this in all browsers soon).
  - sosborn 9y ago
    Annoying stuff is always annoying, but the major complaints about flash were centered on security holes and excessive CPU utilization.
    - koonsolo 9y ago
      Sure, I'm willing to accept that, including that Flash is not a web standard. But another solution might have been to make a Flash web standard, with open implementations, instead of HTML5. This is really an architectural choice that was made, not so much the blocking of a plugin. They chose to integrate all in 1 big pile, instead of keeping web content and multimedia separate. And now you end up with a washed out version of both.
joefreeman 9y ago
Ironically I'm seeing several auto-playing ads (with sound) on this article.
grumblestumble 9y ago
How does this relate to media sites? eg. Netflix, HBOGo, the rest of the cable channel web apps? If a user clicks on a thumbnail preview and is taken to a separate page with a video, will they now need to click on it to begin playback? Or is clicking on the thumbnail an "expression of interest" that can somehow be tracked across pages? For Netflix, how does this impact autoplaying the next episode of a show? If the above UX issues can't be solved for, this is a hammer which is going to have an adverse impact on a growing part of the web.
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  All of that is explained in the [design docs][1]. There are heuristics that will ensure sites like Netflix are not impacted. [1]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EH7qZatVnTXsBGvQc_53R97Z0xqm6zRblKg3eVmNp30/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EH7qZatVnTXsBGvQc_53R97Z...
- grumblestumble 9y ago
  Looks like this is taken into account by the MEI doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJLg14Ogf-ekAFNymAJoU/mobilebasic https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJ... as well as "The user tapped or clicked somewhere on the site during the browsing session" (from https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/audio-video/autoplay https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/audio-video/auto...) which should make it a non-issue for SPAs focused on video playback.
taytus 9y ago
2017 and this is a brand new feature. Think about it...2017.
gras 9y ago
I wonder if this will also apply to YouTube.
vit05 9y ago
I think, as a consumer, that is great. But, isn't a little worrying how Google is starting having so much power in induce how we can experience the Internet?
- javajocky 9y ago
  You're not wrong. Because of their browser share, Google on the desktop and Apple on mobile basically can control how people experience the internet, and they're now choosing to exert that power. It's something to keep an eye on. People might like what they're doing right now, but what if they don't like something they do two steps down the road?
solomatov 9y ago
Autoplay videos are popup windows of 2010s
CM30 9y ago
I'm probably missing something here, but the document says that media autoplay is allowed if visitors keep visiting the site and interacting with the video player: > The MEI score will be computed as is: > If number_of_visits < 5: > Return 0 > Else > Return number_significant_playback / number_of_visits https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJLg14Ogf-ekAFNymAJoU/edit#heading=h.7efd85kwebui https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJ... Doesn't that mean some of the worst sites affected by this might still manage to get videos and sound files autoplaying? Because if you go to a news site, it's quite likely you may end up watching a video about the story. But at the same time... you don't want the background ads to automatically play, nor do you want said video playing by default on return visits. Yet this system seems like it may allow the latter two things to happen.
- jessriedel 9y ago
  Yea, it seems like site-specific permission settings are the way on this. The "Do you want to share your location with this website?" check seems to work fairly well. I think "Do you want to allow videos with sound to autoplay?" would too.
  - Klathmon 9y ago
    You have to be very careful with that though. Already it seems that 75%+ of news sites ask me to show notifications, and the alerts alone asking for it are getting annoying. I'd be even more upset if every site now had to ask for permission to do all kinds of things (Do you want to allow sound? Do you want to allow cookies? Do you want to allow video?) I don't know the answer on how to deal with this stuff, but I don't think putting everything behind requests to the user is a good option (and clearly just allowing everything is a bad idea as well).
    - CM30 9y ago
      It's a hard one to deal with. On the one hand, all these alerts can make people think about what they really want a site to be able to do. I mean, you're probably a bit less forgiving of a site using http if its marked as insecure and messages get shown when you type into a password field. But at the same time... they also make people blind to them. Get too many alerts, and people will just ignore them. Will people just click yes if every site asks to use autoplaying videos? It's hard to tell.
j45 9y ago
Nice to see such ads penalized on the search side, and prevented on the browser side.
lamontcg 9y ago
kill it all, please. let me enable it for the few sites that i actually want to watch videos on.
EGreg 9y ago
As usual it shouldn't be one way or the other for everyone. THIS SHOULD BE A SETTING! Some people like sound at home and some at work don't.
kstenerud 9y ago
If they'd also block mouseover autoplay, my world would be complete.
appleiigs 9y ago
Does "stop autoplaying" also include not downloading the big media file?
graphememes 9y ago
Chrome should be abandoned. This corporation controls way too much.
just2n 9y ago
I think this is a good thing but I'm curious why the same reasoning isn't used towards preventing ads and trackers. They're both unwanted unless the user expresses an interest and as a bonus they also degrade performance or consume power and data on mobile devices. I want something like uBlock running in Chrome on Android. I can do it in CopperheadOS or with Firefox, but it blows my mind that Google recognizes these types of issues but won't deal with perhaps the most egregious one.
katastic 9y ago
Gizmodo is running an article about how THIS is the dangerous thing Google that will destroy the web. http://gizmodo.com/chrome-will-soon-block-autoplay-videos-with-sound-heres-1814207806 http://gizmodo.com/chrome-will-soon-block-autoplay-videos-wi... I can't stop laughing.
makecheck 9y ago
This must be fixed long-term by segregating browser capabilities into tiers that are clearly visible to the user, and severely limiting defaults on data size, compute time, etc. especially when your site claims to belong in the "simple web site" tier. In other words, unless the user thinks it makes sense for you to download lots of data and do complex things, you can't.
lasermike026 9y ago
Thank You Google!
mizzao 9y ago
Chrome's "own ad blocker" mentioned in the article sounds good in theory, but seems like a slippery slope to eventually making it simply show only Google's own ads.
- franga2000 9y ago
  Exactly! This isn't something that could happen, this is something that absolutely WILL happen. And when it does, Google will have won yet another battle against the decentralized web.
fapjacks 9y ago
All the stipulations here basically just mean it's a decision with no legs. If you don't want autoplaying audio, just install one of the many browser extensions that prevent this, e.g. "Disable HTML5 Autoplay". Alternatively, uBlock Origin and uBlock Origin Extra go a very long way to cleaning up my experience just by blocking any ads. It really only seems Bloomberg has gone out of their way to worsen the experience for UBO users, but that's not news you can't get somewhere else. The IBTimes is another with autoplay audio/video which is hard to completely kill, even with the extension armed. But again, that's not news you can't get somewhere else usually.
moomin 9y ago
So here's the antitrust angle: what do you want to bet it'll have a default exception for YouTube but not other video sites?
KyleBerezin 9y ago
Look at this headline, "Chrome Will Soon Block Autoplay Videos With Sound—Here's Why You Should Be Worried" [1] What a brazen attempt at fear-mongering so they can protect their ability to be more ad-intrusive than porn websites. [1] http://gizmodo.com/chrome-will-soon-block-autoplay-videos-with-sound-heres-1814207806 http://gizmodo.com/chrome-will-soon-block-autoplay-videos-wi...
- conductr 9y ago
  Meanwhile the autoplaying video ad with sound on that page has no pause/stop/mute controls. Exactly why "Pushing advertisers to create a better browsing experience seems like it’s good for everyone" will never work unless browsers draw some lines
diminish 9y ago
Best would be stopping huge video downloads and auto plays. Sound is distracting but not that important as users have various levels of mute capabilities.
willlll 9y ago
This is bad news for my personal homepage, the autoplay music is an important part of the experience.
- amiga-workbench 9y ago
  I have to agree, nice website!
  - paulmd 9y ago
    I think an early frontrunner for the next President of the Internet nomination has just emerged. http://i.imgur.com/lhz0PYt.gif http://i.imgur.com/lhz0PYt.gif As the internet expands into other areas of life, we've seen the rise of special-interest groups such as the Weeaboo League, and issues such as Bringing Anime To Life are expected to play a critical role in shaping the outcome of this election. Would you care to comment on this issue? #AllWaifusMatter
caiob 9y ago
Safari does this on High Sierra.
WoodenChair 9y ago
Safari has had this for a while in the public beta of High Sierra and also has turned off plugins by default for eons... now how about following its lead on that cookie thing advertisers love to do to track... oh wait.
shp0ngle 9y ago
Does this mean that YouTube won't play automatically after clicking on a video?
consto 9y ago
There are two sites, and two sites only that I like autoplay on: YouTube and Twitch.
rakibtg 9y ago
I started feel bad for facebook, as it auto plays its ad while scroll. Thanks Google.
tim333 9y ago
Yay! Thank goodness. I've got 3 different extensions trying to achieve that to some extent (Stop HTML5 Autoplay, Flashcontrol and uBlock for some elements the others miss). They still miss some bad stuff and block some good. I just wish they'd make it easy to block all video apart from things where you actually click the play button.
franga2000 9y ago
Would it not make more sense to do something similar to what Firefox does for pup-ups? The first time a site wants to autoplay, ask the user for permission and allow them to "always allow on this site".
james33 9y ago
There are a lot of legitimate uses for autoplay that users are expecting. This is going to degrade the user experience for these legitimate uses, such as games. It is frustrating that some bad actors are able to cause everyone else to take a step back.

670 points by piyushgupta27 9y ago

Technical details: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/audio-video/autoplay https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/audio-video/auto...

stewartjarod 9y ago

Finally, we are past the 90's fad of auto-playing crap on page load... thanks, Chrome.

outsidetheparty 9y ago

It's a start. Allowing users to disable autoplay altogether would be better, but shutting down the audio is better than nothing. It's a shame that browsers increasingly have to actively defend against website behavior, instead of just being tools for displaying those websites; but, well, here we are.

msla 9y ago
Autoplay music was in for a while, went out, then came back in, from what I recall: Back in the 1990s, it was MIDI files on the stereotypical Geocities page, or completely hand-made pages, and that went out in a massive design backlash against those kinds of sites. Now, it's coming back in the form of autoplay video on news sites, for example, which would have been impossible in the dial-up era. So this isn't a new thing, it's an old one that's come back. Annoying people have always been annoying.
- outsidetheparty 9y ago
  Yeah, I guess you're right. Seems like back in the day it wasn't nearly as pervasive, you'd know to expect a terrible MIDI track if you hit somebody's MySpace page but generally didn't need to worry about it elsewhere -- but maybe that's rose-colored nostalgia speaking. (I've never used the phrases "rose-colored nostalgia" and "MySpace" in such close proximity before)
  - icebraining 9y ago
    MySpace can a bit later than what msla is referring to.. in fact, the MySpace period (mid 2000s) may have been the best in this regard, as the amateur site makers were increasingly people who didn't know HTML and used more restricted tools like Blogger, but the bandwidth for pervasive video wasn't around yet.
- loeg 9y ago
  It was also somewhat popular in the 2000s on Myspace.
- wlesieutre 9y ago
  >Annoying people have always been annoying. But it increases engagement!!! I'm happy to see these changes coming.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    "Engagement" is one of those words, like "value-add", that mean someone is trying to fuck you over.
  - msla 9y ago
    Ad tech is indistinguishable from toddlers who haven't learned the difference between good attention and bad attention.
    - wlesieutre 9y ago
      Is not that they haven't learned, it's that even if you're pissed at an advertisement or whatever other annoying thing they did, at least you're looking at it. And will probably remember it. That's what's important!
      - nhtaoe78th2 9y ago
        Hence ad blockers and advertisers crying over browser makers reducing the ability to track users.[0] [0]http://www.adweek.com/digital/every-major-advertising-group-is-blasting-apple-for-blocking-cookies-in-the-safari-browser/ http://www.adweek.com/digital/every-major-advertising-group-...
      - danso 9y ago
        I agree that it's possible that annoying ads do work for advertisers. Just like super-expensive Super Bowl ads bring in a good return on investment even if I think I already like Coca-Cola enough to not need to see another commercial. But the ads could be both beneficial for one party (the advertiser, and/or the brand) while being hugely terrible for the host. I'm a news junkie but I actively do not go to CNN.com. Not just I don't visit its front page, but will just ignore any content that's being shared from that domain because I know the ad/video-junk consistently ruins my ability to consume (and enjoy) the content, no matter how great or important it might be.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
aclelland 9y ago
It appears that there is already a feature in Chrome for Android which allows this. It will be removed around the same time as this patch to make things more 'consistent' >Removing the block autoplay setting that is currently available on Chrome for Android
- Frank2312 9y ago
  I did not know there was an option for this. I have now enabled it. Thanks
andybak 9y ago
> It's a shame that browsers increasingly have to actively defend against website behavior, You make this sound like a new trend but it was always thus. Didn't you live through the 90s before pop-up blockers were built in to browsers? Not to mentionvarious abusive plugins, attempts to trick you into installing toolbars, the hell that was RealPlayer, rewriting your history to prevent 'back', etc etc.
- outsidetheparty 9y ago
  ah phooey just let me have my totally unwarranted nostalgia for imaginary better days gone by
  - 0xfeba 9y ago
    I wish we lived in a place more like the America of yesteryear that only exists in the brains of us Republicans. - Ned Flanders
- nix0n 9y ago
  You're right, but the arms race has marched on. HTML5 has increased the amount of work I have to do, I miss the days when Flashblock was all I needed. (I would love to be wrong about this, please show me an HTML5 blocker with a site-based whitelist.)
  - andybak 9y ago
    Not quite clear on what a "HTML5" blocker is. I'm guessing you don't literally mean "block HTML5"...
Ajedi32 9y ago
It looks like they're also going to add a new permission for audio: https://plus.google.com/photos/photo/100132233764003563318/6458153465994765378 https://plus.google.com/photos/photo/100132233764003563318/6... It's allowed by default, but I imagine you can change that in settings as with all other permissions. That way you could have a whitelist of sites that are allowed to play audio.

MBCook 9y ago

> The content is muted, or does not include any audio (video only) Sigh. So no surprise audio but nothing to stop the trend of silent video ads or (even worse) muted live TV? How about NO auto playing live video or files over 250k? Don't waste my bandwidth streaming stuff I'm not trying to watch.

giancarlostoro 9y ago
I really want no auto playing of any multimedia. I wish browsers didn't support this functionality at all. The user should not ever be forced to do / go through something he does not expect to happen.
- loeg 9y ago
  I think it's ok for specific video pages on multimedia-first sites, like Youtube. (I'm not a fan of autoplay when you go to a page with multiple results, such as a creator's page.) That's about it, though.
  - giancarlostoro 9y ago
    Like I said, it's fine if it's expected.... If it's the ONLY video in the whole page, and it's the main set of content.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Right, but how would the browser tell which is the main set of content?
      - lamontcg 9y ago
        Let me control it. Be dumb and stupid and off by default, and if I want to watch videos on a site, I'll enable it.
      - Dylan16807 9y ago

tweakz 9y ago

This, along with Google's plans to integrate an ad blocker into Chrome (mentioned at the end of the article), add up to Chrome's team seriously looking to clean up its act.

danso 9y ago

Autoplay seems to be something universally reviled and yet the trend seemed to be that enough people tolerated it to make advertisers and sites double down on it: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/19/facebook-users-complain-autoplaying-videos-sound-how-to-turn-it-off https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/19/facebook-... > During Facebook’s announcement of the feature in February, product manager Dana Sittler and engineering manager Alex Li said: “As people watch more video on phones, they’ve come to expect sound when the volume on their device is turned on.” > *"After testing sound on in News Feed and hearing positive feedback, we’re slowly bringing it to more people.” Likely Chrome's feature won't affect FB given how much FB is on mobile but I'm interested in how media sites, such as CNN, will be impacted. Seems like they've become dependent on throwing up an annoying newscast video (with post-roll ads) for every article. Many times unrelated.

drewg123 9y ago
I've pretty much stopped going to CNN because of this. I have managed to block a lot of this video by using privacy badger and blocking the underlying CDNs where it is played from. However, I've never been able to block CNN effectively, so I've just given up on them.
- lamontcg 9y ago
  Newsweek's autoplay is literally cancer. I've got the disable HTML5 autoplay, but the newsweek site is so aggressive about autoplaying that it bugs out the browser.
  - drewg123 9y ago
    The "just read" chrome extension seems to work pretty well at stopping media playback for Newsweek.
- astronautjones 9y ago
  They're really bad about it. But I recently discovered that they offer this service: http://lite.cnn.io/en http://lite.cnn.io/en I really wish washington post, nyt, etc would offer something similar, and really miss the days where everyone had wap versions available

RUG3Y 9y ago

A step in the right direction.

camus2 9y ago

I'm not sure why all these websites decided that auto-playing video is a good thing. It's annoying as hell. I click on an article for reading, I'm not clicking on a youtube playlist. The latest craze among web designers being videos that follow the reader even when they are scrolling down the page! Enough! Can we have a designer here explaining why they do this? If it's about engagement, i'm not going back to your website if you do that to me once.

danso 9y ago
That scrolly-video you refer to, I wonder if it was an evolutionary response to ad blockers basically shutting down pup-up ad video. So the justification would probably be "the bottom line"
exodust 9y ago
If the video follows you down the page in a paused state, with thumbnail and "play" icon, would this be okay? The video that follows you down the page is trying to help you, not annoy you. It gives you the chance to read the article while having the vision there too. It's only a problem if the video autoplays, which unfortunately is all of the time on all sites that do this.
- JoshTriplett 9y ago
  > If the video follows you down the page in a paused state, with thumbnail and "play" icon, would this be okay? Absolutely not. If the video is useful content, put it front and center, and let the user hit "play" on it; if they scroll it away, accept that they don't want it. If it's unrelated content (as with the thousands of "news" sites that want to autoplay an unrelated "hey look at this completely unrelated garbage" video), put it under a "related stories" column or similar, and stop making it jump around the page to draw attention. The user is already on the page they wanted, their attention is exactly where they want it to be, and your job is to serve them what they want, not what you want. "Engagement" might be easy to measure (hey look, if we pester the hell out of users we get a few more users who accidentally watched the video), but the much better metric for long-term sustainability is "how many users love your site and think 'this is awesome'".

stablemap 9y ago

This will be in Safari 11 too: https://webkit.org/blog/7734/auto-play-policy-changes-for-macos/ https://webkit.org/blog/7734/auto-play-policy-changes-for-ma...

javajocky 9y ago
In Safari it auto-blocks ALL video, not just with sound.
- amiga-workbench 9y ago
  Isn't that only on mobile? I've had to push back on looping video backgrounds from designers far too many times to count.

artursapek 9y ago

Doesn't YouTube technically autoplay videos? Is this going to disable that?

danso 9y ago
The design document talks about applying a heuristic to determine which sites are expected by users to play video: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJLg14Ogf-ekAFNymAJoU/mobilebasic https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJ... > The Media Engagement Index (MEI) aims to provide a metric reflecting the engagement of a given user with regards to media playback on a given origin. The intent of this metric is to allow websites scoring high enough to be able to bypass the new unified autoplay policy, thus reducing the cost on the ecosystem.
- kuschku 9y ago
  So, all existing pages get a bonus over new websites? That’s also suboptimal.
  - danso 9y ago
    Hasn't that been the case since Google's, aka BackRub's, very birth?
- ravenstine 9y ago
  Ugh, that sounds dreadful. Doesn't this prevent anyone besides YouTube and a handful of other sites from establishing themselves as video hosting sites? Besides that, adding another hard-to-predict layer to the web is just... bleh. We shouldn't need heuristics to make the web a nice place to be. Boycotts on website should start becoming a regular thing. I simply don't return to websites that pull shenanigans like autoplaying videos on scroll. If I must, I use archive.is so that crap gets stripped out and I don't give them a genuine hit.
  - Dylan16807 9y ago
    It kicks in once the user visits a site 5 times. Nothing that really favors big sites. I have no idea what to do about the hundreds of gotchas around html/css/javascript.

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

>Chrome will only autoplay a given piece of content when the media won’t play sound or the user has indicated an interest in the media. I wonder if a certain "Tube" site will have "indicated interest" on by default, hmm...

izzydata 9y ago
Probably. I can't imagine the point of going to a youtube page that is solely dedicated to a video and having no intention of watching or listening to it. I wouldn't be opposed to being required to click play though.
- wolfgang42 9y ago
  > I can't imagine the point of going to a youtube page that is solely dedicated to a video and having no intention of watching or listening to it. When you click a notification of a comment reply, it takes you to the video page, jumps down to the comment, and then starts playing the video. This means you have to scroll up, pause the video, then scroll back down to read the comment in peace.
  - izzydata 9y ago
    Good enough reason for me to keep it muted and / or paused.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  I wonder how this will affect YouTube playlists, though.
Ajedi32 9y ago
Not by default, but I imagine most YouTube users will have a high enough Media Engagement Index to allow it: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJLg14Ogf-ekAFNymAJoU/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJ...

amelius 9y ago

As much as I like this idea, I'm sure that this will also cause problems in certain cases. Therefore, I'd like to see per-website "capability settings", just like you can allow smartphone-apps to access your microphone, camera, et cetera. And an API for websites to determine which capabilities they have, and an API to request the browser to ask the user to add a capability.

benjaminjackman 9y ago
With an always veto by default option, similar to the way pop up windows are blocked / handled. I much prefer seeing the little red x over a window icon in the location bar that I can click on in my own time than the modal drop down "this site wants to send you notifications" thing that I have to deal with right away, especially since I am always going to say 'no thanks' to the notifications and almost certainly autoplay as well.

ilamont 9y ago

It's a war for attention, and ultimately, money. If sites can't autoplay video with sound, they'll switch to more of the junk videos that make it onto Facebook (muted by default, I believe), which include giant captions or other distracting elements.

polygot 9y ago

What about YouTube? I'm sure they'll add an exception for it, but it technically does classify as automatically playing a video when you click on a link.

exodust 9y ago
Just allow it for youtube, while keeping everything else blocked. Whitelisting is the best option because there aren't that many websites primarily about playing video. Nobody goes to Youtube for other activities. Clicking a video link means you intend watching. News websites are the worst. Clicking a news article means I want to read the article, not watch a video. If I want to watch the video on a news website (rare) I will press play. If they autoplay videos, I send them nasty angry feedback and don't return if I can help it.
- franga2000 9y ago
  Whitelisting is about the worst thing you could do. It makes any kind of competition and therefore inovation on the web impossible and under the vendor's control. Simply ask the user to allow autoplay, same as you would with mic or camera permissions.
SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
I would prefer that YouTube not autoplay. So I hope they make sote-settings (like with JS) and we can both have our way.

k3oni 9y ago

Auto-playing crap bugs the hell out of me. Some news sites do it as well even when you go and Pause the player, it will go on and play ahead after a few seconds. Started using "Disable HTML5 Autoplay"[1] extension in Chrome and works great. I wish every browser would stop sound and video by default until i hit Play or have a setting for that. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-autoplay/efdhoaajjjgckpbkoglidkeendpkolai?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-auto...

otalp 9y ago
Safari is going to stop Autoplay by default in High Sierra
koonsolo 9y ago
That's what you get when you don't clearly separate text content from multimedia. With HTML5 it's all mixed together. And now you end up with text content full of annoying interactions, and crippled down multimedia functionality.
andrewfong 9y ago
I find the extension rather unreliable actually. There are a lot of sites (e.g. Twitter embeds) where turning off autoplay also seems to break manually clicking play as well (forcing me to temporarily disabled the extension and reload page).
- gaius_baltar 9y ago
  > There are a lot of sites (e.g. Twitter embeds) where turning off autoplay also seems to break manually clicking play as well Pretty sure this is by design, as Twitter wants that content to auto-play. Forcing a poor experience for people who use blockers and making us white-list their domain seems a suitable strategy. It's something like Facebook chat in mobile mode. Facebook wants its cattle to install that spyware-ridden messenger, so first they disable chat/messenger in the mobile site (not sure they already killed it, last time I checked there was only a warning; need to create a new bunch of test accounts to check again). As people will fight the change by using desktop-mode in mobile (one of the best features of Firefox for Android), they have a incentive to make the desktop site intentionally unusable in touch devices.

j_s 9y ago

Devil's advocate / counterpoint: https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/908675882587484160 https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/908675882587484160 My complaint here is that Google is making things worse for media/game pages by making life good for people reading web content proper

CJefferson 9y ago
If you interact with the element it can play sound, so games will just be silent until you first click on them.
fish_fan 9y ago
I mean, "worse" here is really a relative term when it's so easy to re-enable for a page. I can't say i'm empathetic when i mostly see stupid autoplayed news clips and car ads.
koonsolo 9y ago
And this one: "What's interesting here is how what this really demonstrates is that Flash really was exactly what we wanted". With HTML5, who didn't see annoying JavaScript popups and autoplay videos coming? Seriously. If you think about the web, think about 2 things: 1. Text content 2. Multimedia content People complaining about Flash always used arguments for nr 1. For me, I want my text content to be really static text content, and my multimedia content to be boxed-in multimedia. HTML4 and Flash were good at that. Now you have a mix of both: 1. Text content with annoying interactions 2. Crippled multimedia content (think about the terrible way iOS handles audio for HTML5 games. Expect this in all browsers soon).
- sosborn 9y ago
  Annoying stuff is always annoying, but the major complaints about flash were centered on security holes and excessive CPU utilization.
  - koonsolo 9y ago
    Sure, I'm willing to accept that, including that Flash is not a web standard. But another solution might have been to make a Flash web standard, with open implementations, instead of HTML5. This is really an architectural choice that was made, not so much the blocking of a plugin. They chose to integrate all in 1 big pile, instead of keeping web content and multimedia separate. And now you end up with a washed out version of both.

joefreeman 9y ago

Ironically I'm seeing several auto-playing ads (with sound) on this article.

grumblestumble 9y ago

How does this relate to media sites? eg. Netflix, HBOGo, the rest of the cable channel web apps? If a user clicks on a thumbnail preview and is taken to a separate page with a video, will they now need to click on it to begin playback? Or is clicking on the thumbnail an "expression of interest" that can somehow be tracked across pages? For Netflix, how does this impact autoplaying the next episode of a show? If the above UX issues can't be solved for, this is a hammer which is going to have an adverse impact on a growing part of the web.

Ajedi32 9y ago
All of that is explained in the [design docs][1]. There are heuristics that will ensure sites like Netflix are not impacted. [1]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EH7qZatVnTXsBGvQc_53R97Z0xqm6zRblKg3eVmNp30/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EH7qZatVnTXsBGvQc_53R97Z...
grumblestumble 9y ago
Looks like this is taken into account by the MEI doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJLg14Ogf-ekAFNymAJoU/mobilebasic https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJ... as well as "The user tapped or clicked somewhere on the site during the browsing session" (from https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/audio-video/autoplay https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/audio-video/auto...) which should make it a non-issue for SPAs focused on video playback.

taytus 9y ago

2017 and this is a brand new feature. Think about it...2017.

gras 9y ago

I wonder if this will also apply to YouTube.

vit05 9y ago

I think, as a consumer, that is great. But, isn't a little worrying how Google is starting having so much power in induce how we can experience the Internet?

javajocky 9y ago
You're not wrong. Because of their browser share, Google on the desktop and Apple on mobile basically can control how people experience the internet, and they're now choosing to exert that power. It's something to keep an eye on. People might like what they're doing right now, but what if they don't like something they do two steps down the road?

solomatov 9y ago

Autoplay videos are popup windows of 2010s

CM30 9y ago

I'm probably missing something here, but the document says that media autoplay is allowed if visitors keep visiting the site and interacting with the video player: > The MEI score will be computed as is: > If number_of_visits < 5: > Return 0 > Else > Return number_significant_playback / number_of_visits https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJLg14Ogf-ekAFNymAJoU/edit#heading=h.7efd85kwebui https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJ... Doesn't that mean some of the worst sites affected by this might still manage to get videos and sound files autoplaying? Because if you go to a news site, it's quite likely you may end up watching a video about the story. But at the same time... you don't want the background ads to automatically play, nor do you want said video playing by default on return visits. Yet this system seems like it may allow the latter two things to happen.

jessriedel 9y ago
Yea, it seems like site-specific permission settings are the way on this. The "Do you want to share your location with this website?" check seems to work fairly well. I think "Do you want to allow videos with sound to autoplay?" would too.
- Klathmon 9y ago
  You have to be very careful with that though. Already it seems that 75%+ of news sites ask me to show notifications, and the alerts alone asking for it are getting annoying. I'd be even more upset if every site now had to ask for permission to do all kinds of things (Do you want to allow sound? Do you want to allow cookies? Do you want to allow video?) I don't know the answer on how to deal with this stuff, but I don't think putting everything behind requests to the user is a good option (and clearly just allowing everything is a bad idea as well).
  - CM30 9y ago
    It's a hard one to deal with. On the one hand, all these alerts can make people think about what they really want a site to be able to do. I mean, you're probably a bit less forgiving of a site using http if its marked as insecure and messages get shown when you type into a password field. But at the same time... they also make people blind to them. Get too many alerts, and people will just ignore them. Will people just click yes if every site asks to use autoplaying videos? It's hard to tell.

j45 9y ago

Nice to see such ads penalized on the search side, and prevented on the browser side.

lamontcg 9y ago

kill it all, please. let me enable it for the few sites that i actually want to watch videos on.

EGreg 9y ago

As usual it shouldn't be one way or the other for everyone. THIS SHOULD BE A SETTING! Some people like sound at home and some at work don't.

kstenerud 9y ago

If they'd also block mouseover autoplay, my world would be complete.

appleiigs 9y ago

Does "stop autoplaying" also include not downloading the big media file?

graphememes 9y ago

Chrome should be abandoned. This corporation controls way too much.

just2n 9y ago

I think this is a good thing but I'm curious why the same reasoning isn't used towards preventing ads and trackers. They're both unwanted unless the user expresses an interest and as a bonus they also degrade performance or consume power and data on mobile devices. I want something like uBlock running in Chrome on Android. I can do it in CopperheadOS or with Firefox, but it blows my mind that Google recognizes these types of issues but won't deal with perhaps the most egregious one.

katastic 9y ago

Gizmodo is running an article about how THIS is the dangerous thing Google that will destroy the web. http://gizmodo.com/chrome-will-soon-block-autoplay-videos-with-sound-heres-1814207806 http://gizmodo.com/chrome-will-soon-block-autoplay-videos-wi... I can't stop laughing.

makecheck 9y ago

This must be fixed long-term by segregating browser capabilities into tiers that are clearly visible to the user, and severely limiting defaults on data size, compute time, etc. especially when your site claims to belong in the "simple web site" tier. In other words, unless the user thinks it makes sense for you to download lots of data and do complex things, you can't.

lasermike026 9y ago

Thank You Google!

mizzao 9y ago

Chrome's "own ad blocker" mentioned in the article sounds good in theory, but seems like a slippery slope to eventually making it simply show only Google's own ads.

franga2000 9y ago
Exactly! This isn't something that could happen, this is something that absolutely WILL happen. And when it does, Google will have won yet another battle against the decentralized web.

fapjacks 9y ago

All the stipulations here basically just mean it's a decision with no legs. If you don't want autoplaying audio, just install one of the many browser extensions that prevent this, e.g. "Disable HTML5 Autoplay". Alternatively, uBlock Origin and uBlock Origin Extra go a very long way to cleaning up my experience just by blocking any ads. It really only seems Bloomberg has gone out of their way to worsen the experience for UBO users, but that's not news you can't get somewhere else. The IBTimes is another with autoplay audio/video which is hard to completely kill, even with the extension armed. But again, that's not news you can't get somewhere else usually.

moomin 9y ago

So here's the antitrust angle: what do you want to bet it'll have a default exception for YouTube but not other video sites?

KyleBerezin 9y ago

Look at this headline, "Chrome Will Soon Block Autoplay Videos With Sound—Here's Why You Should Be Worried" [1] What a brazen attempt at fear-mongering so they can protect their ability to be more ad-intrusive than porn websites. [1] http://gizmodo.com/chrome-will-soon-block-autoplay-videos-with-sound-heres-1814207806 http://gizmodo.com/chrome-will-soon-block-autoplay-videos-wi...

conductr 9y ago
Meanwhile the autoplaying video ad with sound on that page has no pause/stop/mute controls. Exactly why "Pushing advertisers to create a better browsing experience seems like it’s good for everyone" will never work unless browsers draw some lines

diminish 9y ago

Best would be stopping huge video downloads and auto plays. Sound is distracting but not that important as users have various levels of mute capabilities.

willlll 9y ago

This is bad news for my personal homepage, the autoplay music is an important part of the experience.

amiga-workbench 9y ago
I have to agree, nice website!
- paulmd 9y ago
  I think an early frontrunner for the next President of the Internet nomination has just emerged. http://i.imgur.com/lhz0PYt.gif http://i.imgur.com/lhz0PYt.gif As the internet expands into other areas of life, we've seen the rise of special-interest groups such as the Weeaboo League, and issues such as Bringing Anime To Life are expected to play a critical role in shaping the outcome of this election. Would you care to comment on this issue? #AllWaifusMatter

caiob 9y ago

Safari does this on High Sierra.

WoodenChair 9y ago

Safari has had this for a while in the public beta of High Sierra and also has turned off plugins by default for eons... now how about following its lead on that cookie thing advertisers love to do to track... oh wait.

shp0ngle 9y ago

Does this mean that YouTube won't play automatically after clicking on a video?

consto 9y ago

There are two sites, and two sites only that I like autoplay on: YouTube and Twitch.

rakibtg 9y ago

I started feel bad for facebook, as it auto plays its ad while scroll. Thanks Google.

tim333 9y ago

Yay! Thank goodness. I've got 3 different extensions trying to achieve that to some extent (Stop HTML5 Autoplay, Flashcontrol and uBlock for some elements the others miss). They still miss some bad stuff and block some good. I just wish they'd make it easy to block all video apart from things where you actually click the play button.

franga2000 9y ago

Would it not make more sense to do something similar to what Firefox does for pup-ups? The first time a site wants to autoplay, ask the user for permission and allow them to "always allow on this site".

james33 9y ago

There are a lot of legitimate uses for autoplay that users are expecting. This is going to degrade the user experience for these legitimate uses, such as games. It is frustrating that some bad actors are able to cause everyone else to take a step back.