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This is because of animated GIFs. If you disable muted video people will just use GIFs instead and it'll chew up way more of your bandwidth than a video file wo
by untog 8y ago
This is because of animated GIFs. If you disable muted video people will just use GIFs instead and it'll chew up way more of your bandwidth than a video file would. If you disable animated GIFs someone will make a JS library that recreates it, using (probably) even more bandwidth and CPU cycles.
This was the case on mobile until recently (maybe a couple of years?) and the benefit to users after the change is obvious. I get the frustration but it's very much a real-world compromise with good reason. I do think that they could make this a configurable option though, much like disabling JS.
EDIT: looks like they did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19077887 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19077887
- simion314 8y agoSome browsers have an option to disable GIF animations, I use this option in Falkon browser
- helb 8y agoFirefox has it, too. The UI is missing, but you can toggle it in about:config. image.animation_mode none
- UI_at_80x24 8y agoThanks for this!
- simion314 8y agoThanks, I set it up now, does anyone know if you can do the same in Chrome/Chromium without extensions?
- kirion25 8y agoChrome was one of the last to actually implement this feature. It took 8 years (!), and Animation Policy (part of the accessibilityFeatures api) still doesn't work that great, and is only available via extensions. https://developer.chrome.com/apps/accessibilityFeatures#property-animationPolicy https://developer.chrome.com/apps/accessibilityFeatures#prop...
- helb 8y agoAnimation Policy extension from Google: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/animation-policy/ncigbofjfbodhkaffojakplpmnleeoee?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/animation-policy/n...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- wlesieutre 8y agoAnd a lot of things that are "animated gifs" really aren't animated gifs anymore, they're using audioless video players. So if you stopped autoplay, everything from gfycat, imgur, and similar would stop playing.
- jononor 8y ago... until clicking the play button.
- 21 8y agoOr until the user switches to alternate browser like I will if Firefox doesn't autoplay soundless animations.
- dgzl 8y agoIt would take a lot more than that for me to switch from Firefox.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 8y agook bye
- dang 8y agoCould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments so we don't have to ban you again? Your substantive posts are just fine. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- m-p-3 8y agoor if it allows to whitelist those domains.
- codetrotter 8y agoAnd when people browse Reddit, do you think they want to individually press play an extra time on each and every video that they look at? Of course they don’t! So everyone ITT saying that “nobody wants automatically playing videos”. Actually yeah, we do, and there are many, and I mean MANY of us.
- llukas 8y agoForcing higher cost to serve ads is not a bad thing...
- tathougies 8y agoThe higher cost here is borne by the consumer though, not the advertiser. Javascript shims to 'play' videos do not cost the advertiser anything, just the user's electricity and (ultimately) society's energy usage.
- llukas 8y agoCan you explain how servers and bandwidth that handle ads on ad network side would be unaffected by serving bigger loads? If we are talking about society energy usage it would be ideal to ban ads/adtech entirely.
- untog 8y agoIn the world of S3, cheap CDNs etc the cost difference would be negligible. The user difference would be more pronounced, though, as their limited bandwidth (particularly on mobile) is taken up downloading a bloated GIF rather than something more useful.
- munk-a 8y agoThe consumer is already bearing an unreasonable amount of cost to support advertising. The philosophy here needs to shift from "You kicked over my sandcastle, what can we do to make you not want to kick over my sandcastle again" to "Advertisers are a parasite and need to be contained in a separate sandbox and never let out" The idea that advertisers are the only thing enabling a free web is bogus and needs to be dispelled, the costs of hosting a small amount of personal content are negligible and prior to the advertising era the occasional dude with cash would just altruistically host random niche websites on a subdomain.
- gpderetta 8y agoIt seems that we need per webpage/domain/tab limits on bandwidth, cpu and memory usage.
- gregmac 8y agoAside from all the problems this would cause with long-lived single-page applications and legitimate uses of high bandwidth (YouTube, Netflix, streaming radio, etc), I think you'd run into the same thing as the comment you're replying to is getting at: developers will find a workaround, and it may be worse than the thing you were originally trying to prevent.
- zanny 8y agoI was recently researching the save-data header for one of my sites to not start caching video files on metered connections. Its still a nascent thing only found in Blink browsers but at least its something.
- jimktrains2 8y agohttps://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/optimizing-content-efficiency/save-data/ https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/o... for reference since I hadn't heard about it before.
- jameane 8y agoTotally. I hate browsing to my local news site - SFGATE because it is always crashing my browser. They have multiple videos autoplaying and even blocking the content on the page. So frustrating.
- _wmd 8y agoJS "motion JPEG" is actually computationally cheap to do at least in Firefox, it just burns a megaton of RAM.. https://sweetness.hmmz.org/2014-04-16-portable-9-22x-compression-of-animated-gifs-with.html https://sweetness.hmmz.org/2014-04-16-portable-9-22x-compres...
- stevenjohns 8y agoThat's an interesting blog post. Are you the author?
- webmobdev 8y ago> If you disable muted video people will just use GIFs instead Let them. And we'll fight that too. We are all still not closing pop-up windows like the yesteryears of the internet because we refused to accept it.
- untog 8y agoWho is "we"? Because the vast majority of users love their animated GIFs. Just look at any social media site. Pop-up windows were easier to banish because people didn't want them. Autoplay, with-sound video too. But animated GIFs are popular. Personally I don't care for them. I don't care for emojis either but good luck to anyone who wants to take either away from users, particularly in a competitive product like a web browser where users can just switch to an alternative.
- dan1234 8y agoI’d be fine with either whitelisting sites or having a button on each gif which starts the animation.
- endless1234 8y agoOk, but that's not the point though? The assumption is that The Average User wants these soundless video gif-likes to autoplay. But The Average User never wanted popups. If you don't want them to autoplay, there probably is a setting or extension for it.
- shawnz 8y agoThat would be way too complicated for the average user who wants their gifs to play. Given what you want is atypical, isn't it reasonable to expect you to configure it manually? Why should everyone else have to manually enable gifs when that is by far the more common preference?
- lugg 8y agoIs it? Where are you guys getting your stats in this? Personally I feel like gifs are annoying and distracting.
- hendersoon 8y agoThere's also setting "media.autoplay.default" to 1. None of that stuff works to turn off _all_ autoplay. The concerns about animated GIFs and javascript obfuscated WEBMs and such only apply to sites that go out of their way to ignore the user's clearly stated preferences. If fighting that sort of thing mandates an arms war, this is a hill we should be willing to die on. Battle until the bitter end, until the rivers run red with blood.
- criddell 8y agoWhy wouldn't they block animated gifs as well?
- phkahler 8y ago>> If you disable animated GIFs someone will make a JS library that recreates it.. Let's disable that too. My browser is not someones corporate programming play room.
- hiccuphippo 8y agoI'd really like them to add a play button for animated gifs too. And of course have them paused by default.
- ValentineC 8y ago> This is because of animated GIFs. If you disable muted video people will just use GIFs instead and it'll chew up way more of your bandwidth than a video file would. I wish there was an option in browsers to prevent the downloading of GIFs (especially on mobile). It used to be useful for artwork, but PNG has taken that over.
- dorgo 8y agoimg[src$="gif"]{ display:none; } edit: at least it prevents them from being displayed :P
- jefftk 8y agoThat will match images whose name ends in "gif", but won't match "/foo.GIF" or simply a "/foo" that is a GIF. You can't tell what content type the server thinks the image is until you get the content-type header, and you can't tell what it actually is until it's been downloaded.
- dredmorbius 8y agoIt's a good 99% solution.
- Anon1096 8y agoMost gifs being served on the web aren't .gif files anymore, but .webm or .mp4 files instead. That css wouldn't even stop half of the gifs most users see on a daily basis.
- dredmorbius 8y agoI can assure you that: 1. The solution as posed works remarkably well. I know this because I use it myself.[1] 2. Extending the pattern to either be case-insensitive or include other animated image formats is pathetically trivial. ________________________________ Notes: 1. Specifically, in my "Annoyances" stylesheet, applied to all sites by default: /* gifs: So, it has come to this ... (xkcd) */ img[src$=".gif"] { opacity: 0 !important; transition-delay: 3s; transition-duration: 1s; transition-timing-function: ease; transition-property: opacity; display: block; } img[src$=".gif"]:hover { transition-delay: 0.3s; transition-duration: 0.3s; opacity: 1 !important; }
- AriaMinaei 8y agoYup. A friend working at an ad company told me when video playback is disallowed, they stream a series of JPEGS and show them frame-by-frame in sync with web audio. I saw it over two years ago. The playback looked stuttery, but it still worked. I know last year Chrome disallowed auto playing web audio, but they probably found a way around that too. Their scripts ran directly on the host's page (not in iframe), so they could probably trigger playback after any mouse event anywhere on the page.
- joe_the_user 8y agoI disable autoplay and it usually works. I close the windows where it doesn't work and that works for the remaining cases. I think the sites trying to do end-runs are generally low-quality and it will be relatively easy to ignore them. Sites like the Atlantic, The New Yorker, and etc don't do end-runs and so disabling makes my experience sooo much better.
- rhizome 8y agoThere's a massive middle in there of HuffPost, Forbes, and their ilk (each is probably an arm of a content marketing villain such as Demand Media or similar) who will autoplay for you all day long if you want. Maybe even on every story.
- babypuncher 8y agoWhy would they go to all this effort? Clearly, this is to play video to users who clearly do NOT want video auto playing. All you accomplish is pissing off the user and wasting your own bandwidth. If I came across a website that did this I would probably never come back.
- blhack 8y agoWhat I've been looking for is just a way to limit bandwidth down to something very small for certain tabs/pages. So, for instance: Washington post/buzzfeed/huffingtonpost/vox/vice etc. all get limited down to like 25kbps. They can try and play video, or steam jpgs, or whatever else they want, but I'll never see it because I don't have the bandwidth. If that caught on, hopefully it would also be the end of gigantic, unnecessary UI libraries.
- LorenPechtel 8y agoI'd take a slightly different approach: A site is allowed a maximum file size and a maximum number of bytes per page. Anything over that will simply fail to load.
- mokus 8y agoI’d love a way to enforce other resource limits as well - cpu, for example. And maybe also a “maximum rate of pixel change” to kneecap the inevitable end-runs around autoplay being disabled.
- gumby 8y agowhy can't animated gifs be click-to-play as well?
- amelius 8y agoSolution: a browser plugin that converts the website to a PNG, segments it, runs OCR on it, and presents it to the user. Note: the plugin could do this on a server, for the additional benefit of smaller bandwidth use.
- marcosdumay 8y agoSo, don't animate the GIFs until the user asks to?
- satvikpendem 8y agoThis is exactly it. I'm building https://getartemis.app https://getartemis.app, which, as you can see on the home page, has an automatic muted video playing of the demonstration of the product. Most people without such autoplay will not want to click play, and thus my email sign-ups will decrease, which is the same rationale as every other site with autoplaying videos. When I first learned Chrome disabled autoplaying videos, I converted my video, which was around 500 kB, to a GIF, which was now 30 MB, with a noticeable decrease in smoothness and quality. Companies will not stop autoplaying videos, they will merely find other ways around it, because autoplaying videos work for the vast majority of users.
- agumonkey 8y agoCall me crazy but we should deprecate gif animations.