5 ms·

I don't want any auto-playing videos, sound or not. They always seem to pop up next to the text I came there to read. I can't focus with that.

idonotknowwhy 9y ago
Then use Firefox :)
- deadlycrayon 9y ago
  +1 It's trivially easy to stop ALL media from autoplaying - including gifs! It's wonderful (but sometimes jarring when I expect a gif to be playing already)
- JoshMnem 9y ago
  Firefox also lets you mute a tab without switching to the tab.
  - positr0n 9y ago
    Chrome does too. Just right click on it and "Mute site" will mute the domain. Forever I think.
- rainbowmverse 9y ago
  I tried it again recently. The mobile app is just too slow to start, and I'm currently stuck with a phone with too little memory to not autokill stuff. I realize Chrome's apparent snappiness is probably due to some questionable and likely anti-competitive integrations by Google, like Microsoft in the 2000s.
- posterboy 9y ago
  Also a consideration if hording tabs. I am mildly annoyed by the memory usage taking almost 8 gb of ram for a mere 70 tabs [1]. I thought chrome had superior history search indexing full text once. Was that feature culled? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16560655 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16560655
jasonkostempski 9y ago
There's already a flag for that: chrome://flags Autoplay policy.
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
  I can't think of one reason why it shouldn't be the default behavior.
- drewg123 9y ago
  However, it does not seem to work in most cases that I've found. I was super excited when it arrived, but I'm still hunting down the domains of auto-play videos and adding them to a blacklist manually. The choices seem to be "document user gesture", "user gesture is required", "no user gesture is required", and "default". There needs to be a "never autoplay any media"
  - pgrote 9y ago
    I thought I was doing something wrong when I set the flag. Thank you for confirming it really doesn't work.
    - jasonkostempski 9y ago
      Guess I should have just preached "use Firefox" like I usually do. That's what I get for trying to see things from the other side for once.
thirdsun 9y ago
Same here. However for me it's not only an annoyance, but since I'm on a metered connection (LTE with severe throttling after 50 GB only avoidable by buying extra volume), this is costing me real money. Opening a Bloomberg article in the background will happily autplay a series of videos I may not notice. And that's with uBlock Origin installed. I just opened such an article and in the 5 minute window since I did so, the page consumed a cool 100 MB for a 2:20 video. It obviously gets worse with longer videos.

idonotknowwhy 9y ago

Then use Firefox :)

deadlycrayon 9y ago
+1 It's trivially easy to stop ALL media from autoplaying - including gifs! It's wonderful (but sometimes jarring when I expect a gif to be playing already)
JoshMnem 9y ago
Firefox also lets you mute a tab without switching to the tab.
- positr0n 9y ago
  Chrome does too. Just right click on it and "Mute site" will mute the domain. Forever I think.
rainbowmverse 9y ago
I tried it again recently. The mobile app is just too slow to start, and I'm currently stuck with a phone with too little memory to not autokill stuff. I realize Chrome's apparent snappiness is probably due to some questionable and likely anti-competitive integrations by Google, like Microsoft in the 2000s.
posterboy 9y ago
Also a consideration if hording tabs. I am mildly annoyed by the memory usage taking almost 8 gb of ram for a mere 70 tabs [1]. I thought chrome had superior history search indexing full text once. Was that feature culled? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16560655 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16560655

jasonkostempski 9y ago

There's already a flag for that: chrome://flags Autoplay policy.

dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
I can't think of one reason why it shouldn't be the default behavior.
drewg123 9y ago
However, it does not seem to work in most cases that I've found. I was super excited when it arrived, but I'm still hunting down the domains of auto-play videos and adding them to a blacklist manually. The choices seem to be "document user gesture", "user gesture is required", "no user gesture is required", and "default". There needs to be a "never autoplay any media"
- pgrote 9y ago
  I thought I was doing something wrong when I set the flag. Thank you for confirming it really doesn't work.
  - jasonkostempski 9y ago
    Guess I should have just preached "use Firefox" like I usually do. That's what I get for trying to see things from the other side for once.

thirdsun 9y ago

Same here. However for me it's not only an annoyance, but since I'm on a metered connection (LTE with severe throttling after 50 GB only avoidable by buying extra volume), this is costing me real money. Opening a Bloomberg article in the background will happily autplay a series of videos I may not notice. And that's with uBlock Origin installed. I just opened such an article and in the 5 minute window since I did so, the page consumed a cool 100 MB for a 2:20 video. It obviously gets worse with longer videos.