Because animated GIFs are already muted, autoplaying videos. If you don't give web devs an efficient way to play silent animations and videos, they resort to ho

Because animated GIFs are already muted, autoplaying videos. If you don't give web devs an efficient way to play silent animations and videos, they resort to horrible and inefficient hacks (animated GIF, image sprites, drawing video frames to a canvas, etc.) Safari allows you to change the autoplay blocker to include all media, not just audible. But, for the web in general, muted autoplay is the right default.