14 ms·

New autoplay policy in Chrome

169 points by AndersSandvik 8y ago

zkms 8y ago
Why is there no way to whitelist an arbitrary website in my browser with this new scheme? http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901 http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901 is broken with the latest Chrome.
gcb0 8y ago
summary: google allow 800 of the international youtube domains to autoplay, plus some 200 other publishers to pretend they are neutral.
- fwdpropaganda 8y ago
  I guess after that €2bn EU fine on the Google Shopping case they've learned to start pretending to be neutral before the fines.
- slow_donkey 8y ago
  Can you provide proof, this is completely unsubstantiated purely from the blog
- kbenson 8y ago
  > summary: google allow 800 of the international youtube domains to autoplay, plus some 200 other publishers to pretend they are neutral. What? How is that an accurate summary? The whole post is about how Chrome will learn your preference for whether to autoplay on domains, not about how it is whitelisting certain domains.
  - dannyw 8y ago
    The browser ships with a pre-whitelisted list. Those sites can autoplay videos from the beginning with no user interaction, which has dramatically less friction than unwhitelisted sites which must get you to interact across 20 different visits. That is a lot of friction. Imagine if someone makes a YouTube competitor. They won't have autoplay for an user's first 20 sessions at minimum! That's significant
    - kbenson 8y ago
      I understand. That's a valid point. It's not a valid summary of the post, when only the whitelist portion is mentioned by itself.
      - gcb0 8y ago
        all youtube domains are whitelisted, and there's no way to remove. only add. summary is very relevant still.
        kbenson 8y ago
        I repeat, it's not a summary if you don't even mention the subject of the submission, which is the system to auto whitelist. It's a criticism, or a counterpoint, or even just a useful addendum, but not a summary. Your point is valid. It deserves to be said. It's still not a summary of the submission, and presenting it as such is not appropriate, IMO. For example, the following would have been a possible way to summarize the submission and also express the additional information you presented: Summary: Chrome will not auto-whitelist auto-play for domains based on learning your preferences. What Google isn't noting is that they allow 800 of the international youtube domains to autoplay, plus some 200 other publishers to pretend they are neutral.
- Amelorate 8y ago
  My interpretation of the article was that chrome ships with a blocklist of websites that have annoying autoplay features, but will automatically remove websites from that blocklist that you usually start by playing their videos, and automatically adds websites to the blocklist if the first thing you do is pause the video. Youtube probably is not on the blocklist, but it will add youtube to your personal blocklist if you always pause the videos.
  - makomk 8y ago
    Other way around, as I understand it - they have a whitelist of sites that are allowed to play audio without interaction, everything else is blocked by default. (This is implemented in a way that completely breaks audio in a bunch of older web-based games and interactive audio experiences, too.)
Jyaif 8y ago
accurate summary: If you don’t have browsing history, Chrome allows autoplay for over 1,000 sites where we see that the highest percentage of visitors play media with sound. As you browse the web, that list changes as Chrome learns.
- flukus 8y ago
  Not that this would be surprising, but does that mean chrome is collecting user data?
  - kowdermeister 8y ago
    It always did.
  - Sylos 8y ago
    When you use Chrome Sync, Google gathers and evaluates your entire browsing history. You can forego it by enabling end-to-end-encryption, but since they require a second password for that, the percentage of Chrome Sync users who use this, is probably close to 0%.
benbro 8y ago
I couldn't find a way to detect autoplay failure when using the YouTube iframe API. We can catch promise failure when using a normal video element. https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-policy-changes#best-practices https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p...
curt15 8y ago
>s you browse the web, that list changes as Chrome learns and enables autoplay on sites where you play media with sound during most of your visits, and disables it on sites where you don’t. What about disabling autoplay even without sound? Unwanted autoplay videos burn through battery even while muted.
- firmgently 8y ago
  and data
- rspeer 8y ago
  They're just modernizing the idea of a GIF. The GIF format was used long after it should have been obsolete, because despite its limitations, it had the key advantage of providing simple, silent animations that autoplay. Now a lot of "GIFs" aren't in GIF format, they're videos with no sound, and that makes a lot of sense because it's 2018 and we've learned some things about compression and video since 1987. If silent videos didn't autoplay consistently, people would keep using actual GIFs, using way more bandwidth for the same purpose.
  - jerrre 8y ago
    you could also block GIFs from animating by default
crystaln 8y ago
The best way to improve autoplay is to disable it. chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy
- drewg123 8y ago
  Which, sadly, does not actually work for me. I've had it disabled since it first appeared and it has barely made a difference. At least for the news site that play unwanted video. The best I've been able to do in Chrome is to block anything that looks like a CDN using Privacy Badger.
- askvictor 8y ago
  There is no disable option there (at least in Chrome 66).
  - crystaln 8y ago
    "Document user activation required" is what you want.
    - tokyodude 8y ago
      Doesn't work. See above
- voxadam 8y ago
  In my experience the equivalent option in Firefox works quite well.
- troydavis 8y ago
  This flag doesn't do what it sounds like it does (and what it should). From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16367457#16370471 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16367457#16370471: > Alas, this flag only prevents video that has sound from auto-playing. It’s the inadequate option that my earlier comment was referring to. > > Here’s more: https://www.chromium.org/audio-video/autoplay https://www.chromium.org/audio-video/autoplay > https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-policy-changes https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p... > > Quoting the blog post, Google’s decision that ”Muted autoplay is always allowed” is the problem. If any other Chrome users wondered why videos now auto-play without sound (even with this option set), at least based on the relatively minimal docs about this flag, this is why.
panic 8y ago
Bret Victor's response: https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/993167096992288771 https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/993167096992288771
- geofft 8y ago
  I genuinely do not understand the artist in the replies who says this has destroyed their work. Can't the website require you to click/tap once to start its thing, without negative impact? I feel like I must be missing something. (There's a mention about not updating code for existing work, which might be it?)
  - _neil 8y ago
    The artist in question has hundreds of pieces of work, many of which he may not have easy (if any) access to anymore. It would take a non-trivial amount of work to fix. But I think he’s also expressing doubt about creating art/work on the web in the future because of things like this.
    - jasonkostempski 8y ago
      It only because of user hostile choices made by browser vendors that it was ever a viable option to begin with and it was a bad bet to think it would last, although Google seems to be doing anything they can to keep things the way they are without directly saying "we'd rather you not be able to stop all media because our business model is to get in your face". No one deserves the unrestrained ability to enter your home and interrupt you in the name of commerce, entertainment, art, or anything else, except maybe emergency.
    - tokyodude 8y ago
      I agree though it would also be likely if he made them native apps they would stop working as well. Lots of native apps on all platforms stop working without updates. The latest for me is Photoshop CS6 which has a 32bit service that MacOS tells me will cease to function soon >:(
  - makomk 8y ago
mholt 8y ago
Until autoplay can accurately detect whether I am in a setting where battery drain and sound is acceptable, I will still keep it off.
geofft 8y ago
The title looks editorialized - can the scare quotes be removed? They don't seem to be in the original.
- thefifthsetpin 8y ago
  The original title is also editorialized, just in the other direction. "New autoplay policy in Chrome" sounds reasonably neutral to me.
  - dang 8y ago
    Ok, we've switched to that. Thanks!
rocqua 8y ago
Why does this system 'learn'. I wouldn't mind a prompt much like desktop-notifications are now. Ask me if a site can auto-play. If google want this on-by-default on youtube, I wouldn't mind. As an upside, this would make it obvious they favor their own product.
- jasonkostempski 8y ago
  A site-wide setting isn't good enough, every media element needs to require user action. It is ridiculous that isn't a working option, Chrome can't be taken seriously as a user agent.
sanxiyn 8y ago
> Chrome does this by learning your preferences... This way, Chrome gives you a personalized, predictable browsing experience. In my experience, "learning" and "predictable" do not go together.
- zamalek 8y ago
  Agreed, it should just be a permission like any other. If I'm on a website where I expect to play media I can remember the preference. They probably don't want to break websites (as autoplay has no permissions model), but breaking the most annoying feature on the web right now is a good thing.
  - bastawhiz 8y ago
    This has already been possible. You can disable sound for all websites in chrome://settings/content/sound Then, you can enable sound manually for each site in the site settings panel.
    - chipperyman573 8y ago
      Wow, I never knew this! I will definitely be doing it now. Does anyone happen to know if this will overwrite this new learning setting?
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
- always_good 8y ago
  Reminds me of fuzzy matching systems like Alfred that will try to learn which key combos you use to launch each app instead of trying to offer you predictability. But "fi<enter>" never launches Firefox anymore because of that one time you accidentally launched Finder instead. And since you keep accidentally launching Finder that way, it never learns that you want Firefox. So you try "f<enter>" but you accidentally launch Flux. And because you keep forgetting it thinks "f" = Flux, it always launches Flux. So you have to use "fir<enter>" to launch Firefox. But "fire<enter>" somehow launches Firewatch, a game you forgot you had installed on your laptop. It's the most obnoxious system ever where each additional keystroke reorders the entire fuzzy result list in the name of "learning." It really is the opposite of predictable.
nightcracker 8y ago
> This way, Chrome gives you a personalized, predictable browsing experience. > predictable What could possibly be more predictable than disabling autoplay altogether? Google says it enabled autoplay for 'over 1000 sites', but we all know Google only cares about one thing and that is playing more ads on YouTube.
- quadrature 8y ago
  If you do this less computer savvy people will wonder why deezer/soundcloud/spotify suddenly stopped working.
- Gaelan 8y ago
  Cynicism aside, YouTube is a typical example of a good use for autoplay. A user clicking a link to YT almost always wants to watch the video. "Predictable" probably wasn't the right word for them to use, but I think this is a reasonable move by Google.
  - coding123 8y ago
    By the same token so would youporn... But I wonder if they made the list.
  - qu4z-2 8y ago
    Youtube is the worst, because not only does it autoplay, but for the first 2s or so it's faffing around with JavaScript so no matter what you do in that time it will subsequently start playing. Like, it'll show up as "playing" and you pause it, then leave the tab, and like a second later the video will start despite your having paused it. (for the record, at least half the time I open a youtube video I don't want it to play immediately)
    - sincerely 8y ago
      i'm not sure if this is something on my end or google's, but i've noticed that in the past few weeks whenever I open a youtube video in a new tab (staying in the current tab), it won't play until i switch to the new one.
askvictor 8y ago
Can we find this auto-generated list of enabled/disabled sites anywhere? Can it be edited manually? Will Chrome notify why a particular site did/didn't auto-play a video? I like Inbox's recent behaviour that explains why it deems a particular email important - it would be good if this sort of explanation was more prevalent with publicly-available ML systems.
- asddddd 8y ago
  Seems to be this blob: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/b67034891a2338982544a9c524ef1394803f985d/chrome/browser/resources/media/mei_preload/preloaded_data.pb https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/b67034891a23389825...
  - askvictor 8y ago
    Gah. A blob with no info about it. Looking a little further, it appears to be a ProtocolBuffer file, but would a bit of documentation hurt?
    - tgsovlerkhgsel 8y ago
      An early version of the proto I found is: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/5d9089080ea5fb0e348bb28f7a396d1181476f0f/chrome/browser/media/media_engagement_preload.proto https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/5d90890... So the proto is a red herring, it's basically just a container for a blob in some other format. https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/803994 https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/80... contains a lot of related files, including https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/803994/9/tools/media_engagement_preload/make_dafsa.py https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/80... which explains the format. I'm surprised that there isn't a plain text version of the list checked in somewhere, but maybe I just missed it.
- joosters 8y ago
  Also, I wonder where chrome stores the user’s autoplay history? Will it be cleared when wiping history? Cookies? Or is it never wiped, leaving a record of visited sites in its storage?
zeusk 8y ago
https://imgur.com/a/QDbVHwH https://imgur.com/a/QDbVHwH I'm surprised Google's documentation is not designed with readability in mind.
millstone 8y ago
This site is quite broken in Safari, with the "related articles" bar drifting up as you scroll down.
cshenton 8y ago
If this had been communicated as "Improving Autoplay Blocking in Chrome" I think it would have been better received. Because that's just what it is. Instead I had a sort of loss aversion based reaction where I think now some things will autoplay that didn't before, but in fact fewer things will autoplay full stop.
omarforgotpwd 8y ago
It catches half of unintended auto plays? So basically Google is rolling with a system that will still annoy you sometimes because that’s what’s best for their advertisement driven bottom line. The faster and more seamlessly ads can get played, the more money google makes.
antoineMoPa 8y ago
With that huge `position:fixed` header and footer, only 1/3 of my chromebook's screen height is actually displaying text from that page.
caiob 8y ago
This reminds me so much of “Gryzzl” on Parks and Rec. “We just want to learn everything about you, collect all your data and watch everything you do”
dredmorbius 8y ago
Most of the word I'd like to use doesn't fly here. But what part of "No, never" does Google not understand? Nuke Chrome, Android, Youtube, and Web search.
gesman 8y ago
Updated "being eaten" preferences for sheeps from wolf. Wolf only does this by learning sheep' preferences. Of course keeping sheeps happy is wolf's first priority.
mikob 8y ago
This broke my accessibility extension for Chrome that lets users control the browser with their voice instead of hands. Since voice isn't counted as a "gesture" the user can't say "play" to start a a video. It's not just autoplay it's any sort of dynamic (js initiated) playing of media.
- mounirlamouri 8y ago
  Hey, would you mind sharing the extension you are using? This should not happen and I would like to help fixing it.
  - mikob 8y ago
    Curious why you say it should not happen? Do you mean technically -- if so, how? https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lipsurf/lnnmjmalakahagblkkcnjkoaihlfglon https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lipsurf/lnnmjmalak... I added an ugly workaround, a slide to the tutorial that asks users to go into their flags and allow autoplay without any gestures. Chrome extensions should have better privileges for playing videos, fullscreening etc. IMO but it all needs to be hacked around limiting extensions.
gwbas1c 8y ago
I think it would be better to just disable autoplay on all websites, and then let me manually enable it. I pretty much continue to install Adblock so I can kill the auto-play elements on websites that just should not autoplay.
- billysielu 8y ago
  100% agree.
khedoros1 8y ago
On a 1366x768 screen, that blog was painful to read. The header and top menu stuff take up about the top 1/4 of the window (and only folds away near the bottom of the page), and the "related articles" takes the bottom 1/4. Clicking the button to hide related helped some. My autoplay desires are pretty simple. If the site's Youtube, Vimeo, or another site that exists purely for video, I expect videos to autoplay. It'll annoy me anywhere else. I'd be fine with a whitelist. What I like the least about their new implementation is that the behavior of the browser will change on its own. I don't like my software trying to predict me or changing its behavior without an explicit command to do so.
- kalleboo 8y ago
  Reader mode (in Safari or Firefox) removes all the cruft
koolba 8y ago
> As you browse the web, that list changes as Chrome learns and enables autoplay on sites where you play media with sound during most of your visits, and disables it on sites where you don’t. This way, Chrome gives you a personalized, predictable browsing experience. Predictable in a user application is the same result from the same action every time. UX changing based on opaque logic and heuristics is anything but predictable.
- jrochkind1 8y ago
  eh, as a user, it's not really predictable to me whether any given click will result in something autoplaying or not, it already feels like a crap shoot.
- jadedhacker 8y ago
  I think it depends a lot on how stable the learning is. If it converges and becomes harder to unlearn, eventually you'll be working from a stable platform... but it doesn't carry over to another browser unless you use the sign in feature. So you'll get a stable experience within a browser but not between browsers of the same make/model.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > unless you use the sign in feature Which then becomes yet another reason to use the sign in feature, and yet another reason to stay with the same browser brand.
    - r00fus 8y ago
      Dark pattern. Why are we signing into browsers again? Happily using FF without that bullshit.
- rtpg 8y ago
  yeah, this seems like such an intense thing to do My bet is that they did this to not break Youtube. I mean it makes sense (you don't want video sites to not work) but it's also such a hacky sort of thing I don't get why they couldn't make this a permission thing like a mic. Ask the website to allow autoplay.
Canada 8y ago
Way to defend Net Neutrality there, by picking which sites are allowed to have certain capabilities.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
masterleep 8y ago
How are HTML5 games supposed to deal with this? They don't really have media that you click on.
- tokyodude 8y ago
  you add a "click to start" button
tokyodude 8y ago
I'm curious if I go to 1000 youtube pages and close in 6 seconds if Chrome will stop autoplay on youtube
profalseidol 8y ago
With FF as my browser and a bookmark toolbar. About only 40% is allotted to showing the actual content.
gumby 8y ago
I just gave up and basically always have the sound off. I occasionally turn up the volume manually for something specific. Unfortunately this does nothing for moving images (moving ads).
amelius 8y ago
The only thing I want is to turn off sound from the start, in my browser at work. (Unfortunately, the PulseAudio volume control doesn't show Chrome in its "applications" tab before it has played a sound.)
- cszerzo 8y ago
  I don't know if that is possible, but you can mute individual web pages (seemingly based on domain name) and they will stay muted until you say otherwise. Works for me pretty well.
- iwalsh 8y ago
  chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy
JepZ 8y ago
I wonder how much I need to know to predict the outcome for a certain website and how they see what the highest percentage of visitors does. Do they see through Google Analytics or do they send my behavior to their servers when I am using Chrome?
potench 8y ago
Preroll (IMA3) integration with an HTML5 video player is a really tricky dance when you’re trying to support mobile/desktop browsers with a resilient and consistent video player experience. Autoplay has been one of the most difficult differences to manage across browsers. There’s no browser api that tells you if autoplay is supported, and you won’t get meaningful errors when you try to autoplay when you can’t. Ultimately the right solution is to just-don’t-autoplay-ever, but it’s a hard sell when you see a 20-40% drop in VOD begins when you remove autoplay. I’m not sure how to even approach Chrome deciding to autoplay “sometimes”. You have to tell the video player to autoplay a video a.m3u8, but swap that out for preroll.m3u8 before you know if any of it is going to work at all. If it fails, you’re gonna see weird errors in IMA3, or at the video player level, none of which really help you decide how to gracefully handle the situation. So yeah, if you have client-side preroll, just don’t autoplay I guess.
- yilugurlu 8y ago
  That means a bunch of ifs in our player code. If iPhone then do that, if chrome then do this, if firefox ... what if chrome, try to autoplay, wait three seconds, fail, disable autoplay, wait for user interaction to run preroll. We'll see how will this end up for our VOD numbers.
- Jaruzel 8y ago
  > Ultimately the right solution is to just-don’t-autoplay-ever, but it’s a hard sell when you see a 20-40% drop in VOD begins when you remove autoplay. Which tells me that with autoplay enabled, 20-40% of people are probably clicking 'stop' just after the video starts playing, so aren't watching your content anyway.
  - potench 8y ago
    You’d need to track your minutes watched per video to see if there’s a drop. I threw an in-exact percentage out as an example, but from what I recall on my last project with video, minutes watched per video went up, not down. Autopilot features work better than you would think...
chaostheory 8y ago
> Chrome does this by learning your preferences. If you don’t have browsing history, Chrome allows autoplay for over 1,000 sites where we see that the highest percentage of visitors play media with sound. As you browse the web, that list changes as Chrome learns and enables autoplay on sites where you play media with sound during most of your visits, and disables it on sites where you don’t. Not good enough. I can't even disable autoplay using Chrome's configuration. It doesn't work... but it works on FireFox.
aaronbrethorst 8y ago
...Or you can just use Safari, which refuses to auto play any video with an audio track.
emodendroket 8y ago
I'd rather just see an explicit white list based on user input.
dandare 8y ago
Maybe I am not the target group but I can not think of a single website with autoplay video w sound. What am I missing?
- mdrzn 8y ago
  More news websites autoplay videos than I'd like to see.
- shusson 8y ago
  try searching for football (soccer) articles
barrystaes 8y ago
I'm happy to see that many people here already suggested that this behaviour is NOT PREDICTABLE. In my view thats a must for any device or tool, including software/computers.
abzolv 8y ago
"In fact, in Chrome a significant number of autoplays are paused, muted, or have their tab closed within six seconds by people who don’t want them." How would they know that without tracking and centrally recording your autoplay actions in Chrome?
- mborch 8y ago
  From Google Analytics.
frozenlettuce 8y ago
In other words: "If you browse in incognito, you will be punished with annoying videos" It is in the same line with FB's "your experience will be worse if you choose to delete your data"
nukeop 8y ago
This is yet another attempt by Google to leverage their browser market hegemony against other publishers. Who wants to bet that Youtube will have autoplay enabled by default in all cases, while other ad providers will have theirs disabled?
megaman22 8y ago
How about an option to just turn the damn things off all the time? Video should never play until I tell it to.
m-p-3 8y ago
If the heuristics are a good as the Android direct-share menu (which suggest contacts I've never talked to..), I'm not very confident it will be a success.
ledjon 8y ago
I think the real rub here is that the developer of the website doesn’t know if Autoplay is going to work or not. From what i read on this the site doesn’t not get access to any information on if Autoplay did work or is going to work. For many business type of applications this is critical as being as low friction as possible is very important. Autoplay for a web conference, for example, makes perfect sense. But the JavaScript developer doesn’t know if this event failed or worked. Plus what if you aren’t in active development on your product that relies on this? You have to go modify functionality that has been perfectly fine for years. I also don’t like how quick google is to make such unilateral changes and just boom there they are in production on the web. Good luck Keeping your site browser agnostic. The but ticket for this feature even advised that site developers check to see if the browser is chrome first and then do different logic. What a mess.
kmfrk 8y ago
I wish we could just code up a permission prompt like you have for microphone and geo access.
kodablah 8y ago
> 1,000 sites where we see that the highest percentage of visitors play media with sound I hate this shit just like I hate their ads program. Where're all the net neutrality proponents when the popular browser vendor is the offender?
skate22 8y ago
Autoplay is so annoying. Ive stopped using certain sites that enable it by default

169 points by AndersSandvik 8y ago

zkms 8y ago

Why is there no way to whitelist an arbitrary website in my browser with this new scheme? http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901 http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901 is broken with the latest Chrome.

gcb0 8y ago

summary: google allow 800 of the international youtube domains to autoplay, plus some 200 other publishers to pretend they are neutral.

fwdpropaganda 8y ago
I guess after that €2bn EU fine on the Google Shopping case they've learned to start pretending to be neutral before the fines.
slow_donkey 8y ago
Can you provide proof, this is completely unsubstantiated purely from the blog
kbenson 8y ago
> summary: google allow 800 of the international youtube domains to autoplay, plus some 200 other publishers to pretend they are neutral. What? How is that an accurate summary? The whole post is about how Chrome will learn your preference for whether to autoplay on domains, not about how it is whitelisting certain domains.
- dannyw 8y ago
  The browser ships with a pre-whitelisted list. Those sites can autoplay videos from the beginning with no user interaction, which has dramatically less friction than unwhitelisted sites which must get you to interact across 20 different visits. That is a lot of friction. Imagine if someone makes a YouTube competitor. They won't have autoplay for an user's first 20 sessions at minimum! That's significant
  - kbenson 8y ago
    I understand. That's a valid point. It's not a valid summary of the post, when only the whitelist portion is mentioned by itself.
    - gcb0 8y ago
      all youtube domains are whitelisted, and there's no way to remove. only add. summary is very relevant still.
      - kbenson 8y ago
        I repeat, it's not a summary if you don't even mention the subject of the submission, which is the system to auto whitelist. It's a criticism, or a counterpoint, or even just a useful addendum, but not a summary. Your point is valid. It deserves to be said. It's still not a summary of the submission, and presenting it as such is not appropriate, IMO. For example, the following would have been a possible way to summarize the submission and also express the additional information you presented: Summary: Chrome will not auto-whitelist auto-play for domains based on learning your preferences. What Google isn't noting is that they allow 800 of the international youtube domains to autoplay, plus some 200 other publishers to pretend they are neutral.
Amelorate 8y ago
My interpretation of the article was that chrome ships with a blocklist of websites that have annoying autoplay features, but will automatically remove websites from that blocklist that you usually start by playing their videos, and automatically adds websites to the blocklist if the first thing you do is pause the video. Youtube probably is not on the blocklist, but it will add youtube to your personal blocklist if you always pause the videos.
- makomk 8y ago
  Other way around, as I understand it - they have a whitelist of sites that are allowed to play audio without interaction, everything else is blocked by default. (This is implemented in a way that completely breaks audio in a bunch of older web-based games and interactive audio experiences, too.)

Jyaif 8y ago

accurate summary: If you don’t have browsing history, Chrome allows autoplay for over 1,000 sites where we see that the highest percentage of visitors play media with sound. As you browse the web, that list changes as Chrome learns.

flukus 8y ago
Not that this would be surprising, but does that mean chrome is collecting user data?
- kowdermeister 8y ago
  It always did.
- Sylos 8y ago
  When you use Chrome Sync, Google gathers and evaluates your entire browsing history. You can forego it by enabling end-to-end-encryption, but since they require a second password for that, the percentage of Chrome Sync users who use this, is probably close to 0%.

benbro 8y ago

I couldn't find a way to detect autoplay failure when using the YouTube iframe API. We can catch promise failure when using a normal video element. https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-policy-changes#best-practices https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p...

curt15 8y ago

>s you browse the web, that list changes as Chrome learns and enables autoplay on sites where you play media with sound during most of your visits, and disables it on sites where you don’t. What about disabling autoplay even without sound? Unwanted autoplay videos burn through battery even while muted.

firmgently 8y ago
and data
rspeer 8y ago
They're just modernizing the idea of a GIF. The GIF format was used long after it should have been obsolete, because despite its limitations, it had the key advantage of providing simple, silent animations that autoplay. Now a lot of "GIFs" aren't in GIF format, they're videos with no sound, and that makes a lot of sense because it's 2018 and we've learned some things about compression and video since 1987. If silent videos didn't autoplay consistently, people would keep using actual GIFs, using way more bandwidth for the same purpose.
- jerrre 8y ago
  you could also block GIFs from animating by default

crystaln 8y ago

The best way to improve autoplay is to disable it. chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy

drewg123 8y ago
Which, sadly, does not actually work for me. I've had it disabled since it first appeared and it has barely made a difference. At least for the news site that play unwanted video. The best I've been able to do in Chrome is to block anything that looks like a CDN using Privacy Badger.
askvictor 8y ago
There is no disable option there (at least in Chrome 66).
- crystaln 8y ago
  "Document user activation required" is what you want.
  - tokyodude 8y ago
    Doesn't work. See above
voxadam 8y ago
In my experience the equivalent option in Firefox works quite well.
troydavis 8y ago
This flag doesn't do what it sounds like it does (and what it should). From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16367457#16370471 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16367457#16370471: > Alas, this flag only prevents video that has sound from auto-playing. It’s the inadequate option that my earlier comment was referring to. > > Here’s more: https://www.chromium.org/audio-video/autoplay https://www.chromium.org/audio-video/autoplay > https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-policy-changes https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p... > > Quoting the blog post, Google’s decision that ”Muted autoplay is always allowed” is the problem. If any other Chrome users wondered why videos now auto-play without sound (even with this option set), at least based on the relatively minimal docs about this flag, this is why.

panic 8y ago

Bret Victor's response: https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/993167096992288771 https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/993167096992288771

geofft 8y ago
I genuinely do not understand the artist in the replies who says this has destroyed their work. Can't the website require you to click/tap once to start its thing, without negative impact? I feel like I must be missing something. (There's a mention about not updating code for existing work, which might be it?)
- _neil 8y ago
  The artist in question has hundreds of pieces of work, many of which he may not have easy (if any) access to anymore. It would take a non-trivial amount of work to fix. But I think he’s also expressing doubt about creating art/work on the web in the future because of things like this.
  - jasonkostempski 8y ago
    It only because of user hostile choices made by browser vendors that it was ever a viable option to begin with and it was a bad bet to think it would last, although Google seems to be doing anything they can to keep things the way they are without directly saying "we'd rather you not be able to stop all media because our business model is to get in your face". No one deserves the unrestrained ability to enter your home and interrupt you in the name of commerce, entertainment, art, or anything else, except maybe emergency.
  - tokyodude 8y ago
    I agree though it would also be likely if he made them native apps they would stop working as well. Lots of native apps on all platforms stop working without updates. The latest for me is Photoshop CS6 which has a 32bit service that MacOS tells me will cease to function soon >:(
- makomk 8y ago

mholt 8y ago

Until autoplay can accurately detect whether I am in a setting where battery drain and sound is acceptable, I will still keep it off.

geofft 8y ago

The title looks editorialized - can the scare quotes be removed? They don't seem to be in the original.

thefifthsetpin 8y ago
The original title is also editorialized, just in the other direction. "New autoplay policy in Chrome" sounds reasonably neutral to me.
- dang 8y ago
  Ok, we've switched to that. Thanks!

rocqua 8y ago

Why does this system 'learn'. I wouldn't mind a prompt much like desktop-notifications are now. Ask me if a site can auto-play. If google want this on-by-default on youtube, I wouldn't mind. As an upside, this would make it obvious they favor their own product.

jasonkostempski 8y ago
A site-wide setting isn't good enough, every media element needs to require user action. It is ridiculous that isn't a working option, Chrome can't be taken seriously as a user agent.

sanxiyn 8y ago

> Chrome does this by learning your preferences... This way, Chrome gives you a personalized, predictable browsing experience. In my experience, "learning" and "predictable" do not go together.

zamalek 8y ago
Agreed, it should just be a permission like any other. If I'm on a website where I expect to play media I can remember the preference. They probably don't want to break websites (as autoplay has no permissions model), but breaking the most annoying feature on the web right now is a good thing.
- bastawhiz 8y ago
  This has already been possible. You can disable sound for all websites in chrome://settings/content/sound Then, you can enable sound manually for each site in the site settings panel.
  - chipperyman573 8y ago
    Wow, I never knew this! I will definitely be doing it now. Does anyone happen to know if this will overwrite this new learning setting?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
always_good 8y ago
Reminds me of fuzzy matching systems like Alfred that will try to learn which key combos you use to launch each app instead of trying to offer you predictability. But "fi<enter>" never launches Firefox anymore because of that one time you accidentally launched Finder instead. And since you keep accidentally launching Finder that way, it never learns that you want Firefox. So you try "f<enter>" but you accidentally launch Flux. And because you keep forgetting it thinks "f" = Flux, it always launches Flux. So you have to use "fir<enter>" to launch Firefox. But "fire<enter>" somehow launches Firewatch, a game you forgot you had installed on your laptop. It's the most obnoxious system ever where each additional keystroke reorders the entire fuzzy result list in the name of "learning." It really is the opposite of predictable.

nightcracker 8y ago

> This way, Chrome gives you a personalized, predictable browsing experience. > predictable What could possibly be more predictable than disabling autoplay altogether? Google says it enabled autoplay for 'over 1000 sites', but we all know Google only cares about one thing and that is playing more ads on YouTube.

quadrature 8y ago
If you do this less computer savvy people will wonder why deezer/soundcloud/spotify suddenly stopped working.
Gaelan 8y ago
Cynicism aside, YouTube is a typical example of a good use for autoplay. A user clicking a link to YT almost always wants to watch the video. "Predictable" probably wasn't the right word for them to use, but I think this is a reasonable move by Google.
- coding123 8y ago
  By the same token so would youporn... But I wonder if they made the list.
- qu4z-2 8y ago
  Youtube is the worst, because not only does it autoplay, but for the first 2s or so it's faffing around with JavaScript so no matter what you do in that time it will subsequently start playing. Like, it'll show up as "playing" and you pause it, then leave the tab, and like a second later the video will start despite your having paused it. (for the record, at least half the time I open a youtube video I don't want it to play immediately)
  - sincerely 8y ago
    i'm not sure if this is something on my end or google's, but i've noticed that in the past few weeks whenever I open a youtube video in a new tab (staying in the current tab), it won't play until i switch to the new one.

askvictor 8y ago

Can we find this auto-generated list of enabled/disabled sites anywhere? Can it be edited manually? Will Chrome notify why a particular site did/didn't auto-play a video? I like Inbox's recent behaviour that explains why it deems a particular email important - it would be good if this sort of explanation was more prevalent with publicly-available ML systems.

asddddd 8y ago
Seems to be this blob: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/b67034891a2338982544a9c524ef1394803f985d/chrome/browser/resources/media/mei_preload/preloaded_data.pb https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/b67034891a23389825...
- askvictor 8y ago
  Gah. A blob with no info about it. Looking a little further, it appears to be a ProtocolBuffer file, but would a bit of documentation hurt?
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 8y ago
    An early version of the proto I found is: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/5d9089080ea5fb0e348bb28f7a396d1181476f0f/chrome/browser/media/media_engagement_preload.proto https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/5d90890... So the proto is a red herring, it's basically just a container for a blob in some other format. https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/803994 https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/80... contains a lot of related files, including https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/803994/9/tools/media_engagement_preload/make_dafsa.py https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/80... which explains the format. I'm surprised that there isn't a plain text version of the list checked in somewhere, but maybe I just missed it.
joosters 8y ago
Also, I wonder where chrome stores the user’s autoplay history? Will it be cleared when wiping history? Cookies? Or is it never wiped, leaving a record of visited sites in its storage?

zeusk 8y ago

https://imgur.com/a/QDbVHwH https://imgur.com/a/QDbVHwH I'm surprised Google's documentation is not designed with readability in mind.

millstone 8y ago

This site is quite broken in Safari, with the "related articles" bar drifting up as you scroll down.

cshenton 8y ago

If this had been communicated as "Improving Autoplay Blocking in Chrome" I think it would have been better received. Because that's just what it is. Instead I had a sort of loss aversion based reaction where I think now some things will autoplay that didn't before, but in fact fewer things will autoplay full stop.

omarforgotpwd 8y ago

It catches half of unintended auto plays? So basically Google is rolling with a system that will still annoy you sometimes because that’s what’s best for their advertisement driven bottom line. The faster and more seamlessly ads can get played, the more money google makes.

antoineMoPa 8y ago

With that huge `position:fixed` header and footer, only 1/3 of my chromebook's screen height is actually displaying text from that page.

caiob 8y ago

This reminds me so much of “Gryzzl” on Parks and Rec. “We just want to learn everything about you, collect all your data and watch everything you do”

dredmorbius 8y ago

Most of the word I'd like to use doesn't fly here. But what part of "No, never" does Google not understand? Nuke Chrome, Android, Youtube, and Web search.

gesman 8y ago

Updated "being eaten" preferences for sheeps from wolf. Wolf only does this by learning sheep' preferences. Of course keeping sheeps happy is wolf's first priority.

mikob 8y ago

This broke my accessibility extension for Chrome that lets users control the browser with their voice instead of hands. Since voice isn't counted as a "gesture" the user can't say "play" to start a a video. It's not just autoplay it's any sort of dynamic (js initiated) playing of media.

mounirlamouri 8y ago
Hey, would you mind sharing the extension you are using? This should not happen and I would like to help fixing it.
- mikob 8y ago
  Curious why you say it should not happen? Do you mean technically -- if so, how? https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lipsurf/lnnmjmalakahagblkkcnjkoaihlfglon https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lipsurf/lnnmjmalak... I added an ugly workaround, a slide to the tutorial that asks users to go into their flags and allow autoplay without any gestures. Chrome extensions should have better privileges for playing videos, fullscreening etc. IMO but it all needs to be hacked around limiting extensions.

gwbas1c 8y ago

I think it would be better to just disable autoplay on all websites, and then let me manually enable it. I pretty much continue to install Adblock so I can kill the auto-play elements on websites that just should not autoplay.

billysielu 8y ago
100% agree.

khedoros1 8y ago

On a 1366x768 screen, that blog was painful to read. The header and top menu stuff take up about the top 1/4 of the window (and only folds away near the bottom of the page), and the "related articles" takes the bottom 1/4. Clicking the button to hide related helped some. My autoplay desires are pretty simple. If the site's Youtube, Vimeo, or another site that exists purely for video, I expect videos to autoplay. It'll annoy me anywhere else. I'd be fine with a whitelist. What I like the least about their new implementation is that the behavior of the browser will change on its own. I don't like my software trying to predict me or changing its behavior without an explicit command to do so.

kalleboo 8y ago
Reader mode (in Safari or Firefox) removes all the cruft

koolba 8y ago

> As you browse the web, that list changes as Chrome learns and enables autoplay on sites where you play media with sound during most of your visits, and disables it on sites where you don’t. This way, Chrome gives you a personalized, predictable browsing experience. Predictable in a user application is the same result from the same action every time. UX changing based on opaque logic and heuristics is anything but predictable.

jrochkind1 8y ago
eh, as a user, it's not really predictable to me whether any given click will result in something autoplaying or not, it already feels like a crap shoot.
jadedhacker 8y ago
I think it depends a lot on how stable the learning is. If it converges and becomes harder to unlearn, eventually you'll be working from a stable platform... but it doesn't carry over to another browser unless you use the sign in feature. So you'll get a stable experience within a browser but not between browsers of the same make/model.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > unless you use the sign in feature Which then becomes yet another reason to use the sign in feature, and yet another reason to stay with the same browser brand.
  - r00fus 8y ago
    Dark pattern. Why are we signing into browsers again? Happily using FF without that bullshit.
rtpg 8y ago
yeah, this seems like such an intense thing to do My bet is that they did this to not break Youtube. I mean it makes sense (you don't want video sites to not work) but it's also such a hacky sort of thing I don't get why they couldn't make this a permission thing like a mic. Ask the website to allow autoplay.

Canada 8y ago

Way to defend Net Neutrality there, by picking which sites are allowed to have certain capabilities.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

masterleep 8y ago

How are HTML5 games supposed to deal with this? They don't really have media that you click on.

tokyodude 8y ago
you add a "click to start" button

tokyodude 8y ago

I'm curious if I go to 1000 youtube pages and close in 6 seconds if Chrome will stop autoplay on youtube

profalseidol 8y ago

With FF as my browser and a bookmark toolbar. About only 40% is allotted to showing the actual content.

gumby 8y ago

I just gave up and basically always have the sound off. I occasionally turn up the volume manually for something specific. Unfortunately this does nothing for moving images (moving ads).

amelius 8y ago

The only thing I want is to turn off sound from the start, in my browser at work. (Unfortunately, the PulseAudio volume control doesn't show Chrome in its "applications" tab before it has played a sound.)

cszerzo 8y ago
I don't know if that is possible, but you can mute individual web pages (seemingly based on domain name) and they will stay muted until you say otherwise. Works for me pretty well.
iwalsh 8y ago
chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy

JepZ 8y ago

I wonder how much I need to know to predict the outcome for a certain website and how they see what the highest percentage of visitors does. Do they see through Google Analytics or do they send my behavior to their servers when I am using Chrome?

potench 8y ago

Preroll (IMA3) integration with an HTML5 video player is a really tricky dance when you’re trying to support mobile/desktop browsers with a resilient and consistent video player experience. Autoplay has been one of the most difficult differences to manage across browsers. There’s no browser api that tells you if autoplay is supported, and you won’t get meaningful errors when you try to autoplay when you can’t. Ultimately the right solution is to just-don’t-autoplay-ever, but it’s a hard sell when you see a 20-40% drop in VOD begins when you remove autoplay. I’m not sure how to even approach Chrome deciding to autoplay “sometimes”. You have to tell the video player to autoplay a video a.m3u8, but swap that out for preroll.m3u8 before you know if any of it is going to work at all. If it fails, you’re gonna see weird errors in IMA3, or at the video player level, none of which really help you decide how to gracefully handle the situation. So yeah, if you have client-side preroll, just don’t autoplay I guess.

yilugurlu 8y ago
That means a bunch of ifs in our player code. If iPhone then do that, if chrome then do this, if firefox ... what if chrome, try to autoplay, wait three seconds, fail, disable autoplay, wait for user interaction to run preroll. We'll see how will this end up for our VOD numbers.
Jaruzel 8y ago
> Ultimately the right solution is to just-don’t-autoplay-ever, but it’s a hard sell when you see a 20-40% drop in VOD begins when you remove autoplay. Which tells me that with autoplay enabled, 20-40% of people are probably clicking 'stop' just after the video starts playing, so aren't watching your content anyway.
- potench 8y ago
  You’d need to track your minutes watched per video to see if there’s a drop. I threw an in-exact percentage out as an example, but from what I recall on my last project with video, minutes watched per video went up, not down. Autopilot features work better than you would think...

chaostheory 8y ago

> Chrome does this by learning your preferences. If you don’t have browsing history, Chrome allows autoplay for over 1,000 sites where we see that the highest percentage of visitors play media with sound. As you browse the web, that list changes as Chrome learns and enables autoplay on sites where you play media with sound during most of your visits, and disables it on sites where you don’t. Not good enough. I can't even disable autoplay using Chrome's configuration. It doesn't work... but it works on FireFox.

aaronbrethorst 8y ago

...Or you can just use Safari, which refuses to auto play any video with an audio track.

emodendroket 8y ago

I'd rather just see an explicit white list based on user input.

dandare 8y ago

Maybe I am not the target group but I can not think of a single website with autoplay video w sound. What am I missing?

mdrzn 8y ago
More news websites autoplay videos than I'd like to see.
shusson 8y ago
try searching for football (soccer) articles

barrystaes 8y ago

I'm happy to see that many people here already suggested that this behaviour is NOT PREDICTABLE. In my view thats a must for any device or tool, including software/computers.

abzolv 8y ago

"In fact, in Chrome a significant number of autoplays are paused, muted, or have their tab closed within six seconds by people who don’t want them." How would they know that without tracking and centrally recording your autoplay actions in Chrome?

mborch 8y ago
From Google Analytics.

frozenlettuce 8y ago

In other words: "If you browse in incognito, you will be punished with annoying videos" It is in the same line with FB's "your experience will be worse if you choose to delete your data"

nukeop 8y ago

This is yet another attempt by Google to leverage their browser market hegemony against other publishers. Who wants to bet that Youtube will have autoplay enabled by default in all cases, while other ad providers will have theirs disabled?

megaman22 8y ago

How about an option to just turn the damn things off all the time? Video should never play until I tell it to.

m-p-3 8y ago

If the heuristics are a good as the Android direct-share menu (which suggest contacts I've never talked to..), I'm not very confident it will be a success.

ledjon 8y ago

I think the real rub here is that the developer of the website doesn’t know if Autoplay is going to work or not. From what i read on this the site doesn’t not get access to any information on if Autoplay did work or is going to work. For many business type of applications this is critical as being as low friction as possible is very important. Autoplay for a web conference, for example, makes perfect sense. But the JavaScript developer doesn’t know if this event failed or worked. Plus what if you aren’t in active development on your product that relies on this? You have to go modify functionality that has been perfectly fine for years. I also don’t like how quick google is to make such unilateral changes and just boom there they are in production on the web. Good luck Keeping your site browser agnostic. The but ticket for this feature even advised that site developers check to see if the browser is chrome first and then do different logic. What a mess.

kmfrk 8y ago

I wish we could just code up a permission prompt like you have for microphone and geo access.

kodablah 8y ago

> 1,000 sites where we see that the highest percentage of visitors play media with sound I hate this shit just like I hate their ads program. Where're all the net neutrality proponents when the popular browser vendor is the offender?

skate22 8y ago

Autoplay is so annoying. Ive stopped using certain sites that enable it by default