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Crawlers & scrapers that rely on headless browsers like Chrome often initiate playback of video on the pages they access. The company I work for (Mux) has a pr
by urlgrey 9y ago
Crawlers & scrapers that rely on headless browsers like Chrome often initiate playback of video on the pages they access.
The company I work for (Mux) has a product that collects user-experience metrics for video playback in browsers & native apps. It's been a non-trivial effort developing a system to identify video views from headless browsers so that we might limit their impact on metrics. Being able to make this differentiation has a real benefit to human users of our customer's websites.
My preference would be for headless browsers to not interact with web video or be easily identifiable via request headers, though I doubt either of these things will happen any time soon.
- criddell 9y agoHow are they initiating playback? Are they pressing play, or just triggering auto-play behavior?
- goerz 9y agoVideo should never play unless actively initiated by the user. That would fix the metrics, as the headless browser probably wouldn't initiate the video playback
- bpicolo 9y agoIf it's a video site, I expect the video to play when I land, e.g. youtube. I'm initiating on purpose by browsing
- nybble41 9y agoRegarding YouTube in particular, I tend to open up videos in background tabs for later viewing and find it very annoying that they start playing automatically before I get around to that tab. I did go there to watch the video—eventually. Just not the second that the page finishes loading. YMMV. A persistent setting to enable or disable auto-play would be ideal.
- JeremyBanks 9y agoChrome doesn't autoplay videos in background tabs until you focus them.
- Whitestrake 9y agoFirefox likewise has toggles for disabling autoplay in background tabs (on by default) and disabling autoplay completely (off by default).
- nybble41 9y agoActually it doesn't even seem to load most of the page in a background tab until it's focused... which is also annoying. (Or perhaps it's just the parts hidden behind 'onload' JavaScript, which these days is most of the page content.) Part of the reason for opening the tab in the background is getting the lengthy loading process out of the way while I'm reading something else. For this reason I tend to activate the tab and then go back to what I was doing before... and then the video auto-plays.
- goerz 9y agoYeah, I definitely don't. But I think a persistent "auto-play" toggle (default "off") is ok.
- chriswarbo 9y agoThe first thing I do when hitting a YouTube URL is stop the video. Then I'll either run youtube-dl on the URL, or just paste it straight into a proper video player (VLC).