5 ms·

I'm happy to see stuff like this. I'd be even happier if the tricks to get video to play were somehow canceled. I have adblocker and video blockers, but someh

I'm happy to see stuff like this. I'd be even happier if the tricks to get video to play were somehow canceled. I have adblocker and video blockers, but somehow, news sites have a video that plays. If I scroll off the page, the video pops out into the lower right hand of the page and resumes playing, even if the big version of the video at the top of the page was stopped /paused (which it is by default), and it needs to be stopped again. On mobile (Android) this is a double nightmare, even in Firefox, because the little video has a tiny little X, and somehow my finger doesn't ever hit X the first time. I can plug in a USB-A connector in the right way faster than I can press that little X. Is there an explanation for this, and am I the only one?

tome 6y ago
Isn't the small video in the corner a feature actually implemented in Firefox itself (picture-in-picture) and nothing to do with the web page? If so then that seems doubly bad!
- calmworm 6y ago
  Firefox doesn't force it. The feature is that you have the option to pull the embedded video into a non static location within your browser window. So you could allow the video to play in view while you scroll through the remainder of the page.
- ric2b 6y ago
  No, the Firefox PiP requires you to click a blue icon, it doesn't activate automatically when you scroll off the video.
floatingatoll 6y ago
If you temporarily set about:config "image.animation_mode" to the value "none", and then restart Firefox, does it stop that video from autoplaying? If so, it's because they're using an animated GIF, which isn't a video. (You can right-click the value you modified in about:config to Reset it back to the default, so that animated GIFs work again, after you're done testing that.)
Shacklz 6y ago
> but somehow, news sites have a video that plays This is so annoying, engaging in such obviously obnoxious UX patterns should be regulated and punished with fines when user-intent tries to be circumvented. The "just dont visit that website lol"-trope really doesn't cut it anymore; operating a news paper organization nowadays is such a cutthroat business that you simply can't not do it if your competition does it, there really needs to be regulation to level the playing field to stop this kind of bullshit
- symlinkk 6y ago
  It’s the free market working as intended - if most people cared, the first site to stop doing auto playing videos would get more traffic and other sites would follow. As of right now, the benefit of auto playing videos outweighs the cost of pissing off the few users who care.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    The free market is the best algorithm for hill-climbing a society into feudalism, one A/B test at a time.
    - sequoia 6y ago
      Can you expand on this? I'm curious what you mean.
      - nitrogen 6y ago
        This topic really deserves an essay, but I'll try to give a few of the seed crystals for my thoughts: - There's no real mechanism in the free market for long-term goal setting, apart from massive capital or collective action. Collective action is pretty hard to organize without capital. - People have vices and virtues. Long-term thinking tends to lead to better outcomes. Long-term thinking tends toward virtues. Short-term instinct tends toward vices. See e.g. the marshmallow experiment. - A/B tests and the concept of "revealed preference" optimize for vice without regard to long-term good. If you ask a smoker if they want to quit, they'll often say yes. But their "revealed preference" shows that they want to keep smoking. So "revealed preference" optimizes for vice. - There's a feedback cycle between the most effective micro-optimizers and the accumulation of capital. So those who have the most money, can afford the most micro-optimizations. And those micro-optimizations favor the holders of the capital at the expense of society at large. Thus we are gradually optimizing ourselves into the will and control of the wealthy, AKA feudalism. We can see this playing out in operating systems, too. Windows, despite MS's antitrust sins, and much as the Slashdot crowd loved to hate it, used to be very focused on compatibility and widespread use. There used to be a saying, "80% of your users only use 20% of your features, but they all use a different 20%". Now everything's gone from focus groups to telemetry. In other words, from planning and virtue, to reactionism and "revealed preference". Anything not used by 100% of users, or anything that doesn't favor the holders of the keys, is at risk of being destroyed in the next automatic update.
Santosh83 6y ago
Indeed am seeing more and more sites that somehow get their videos to autoplay even though I have that explicitly disabled in Firefox settings. I thought user agents had ultimate control over 'mere bytes' sent over the wire but somehow these sites manage to trick the browser and override user preferences.
- ffpip 6y ago
  If a <video> tag is attached to the Video, Firefox stops it. Sites are loading videos in frames (looking at you Reddit) and in GIFs (news sites)
  - jagged-chisel 6y ago
    Wouldn't the frame also be a valid HTML page, with a <video> tag? Perhaps I'm mistaken about how things are working these days, so I'd appreciate some learnin'.
calmworm 6y ago
... then when you do manage to tap/click the X, on some sites it says "closing video..." for 3 more seconds before it closes. Also very annoying.
danShumway 6y ago
Short version of a long story! A few years ago Google implemented autoplay blocking in Chrome. It was designed to fix problems like this, but was riddled with issues. I wrote about it at https://danshumway.com/blog/chrome-autoplay/ https://danshumway.com/blog/chrome-autoplay/. The spec evolved a little bit since then, so not everything in that post is up to date, but most of the core problems still remain (or did the last time I checked). Firefox was forced to follow suit, and to their credit their spec was a lot more sensible, but it was really only papering over the problems in the Chrome spec. It wasn't at a fundamental level thinking about video/audio differently than Chrome was, it was just trying to do the same thing minus the egregiously bad decisions. I feel like a lot of the problems with hijacked interactions on the web can be traced back to spec histories like this. A good implementation of video/audio blocking: - wouldn't reveal to the page that audio was blocked, it would either silently mute the audio or refuse to render the video without reporting an error. - wouldn't have exceptions based around trying to interpret user intent or (in Chrome's case) exceptions based on how you navigated to the page. - wouldn't try to distinguish between things like GIFs, animated backgrounds, and videos (they're all moving pictures that use data and distract motion-sensitive users, you don't need to treat them differently) My (subjective) opinion is that video autoplaying never really got better because we never really tackled the problem correctly from the start, and since then we've just been continuing to apply band-aides on top of a fundamentally broken strategy. > am I the only one? Depending on how much you hate this and how much effort you're willing to put into getting rid of it, disabling 3rd-party Javascript will fix the problem on most news sites. Nearly all of them that I run into load the Javascript to run the player from a separate script being served from a separate subdomain or CDN. It's usually possible (even for news sites that require Javascript) to block that script in specific, or load just enough Javascript to get the page rendering and nothing else.
- NoodleIncident 6y ago
  > wouldn't try to distinguish between things like GIFs, animated backgrounds, and videos (they're all moving pictures that use data and distract motion-sensitive users, you don't need to treat them differently) This would cause 95% of users to correctly say that your browser is "broken", regardless of the opinions of motion-sensitive users on tiny data connections. Having a nuclear option for just these people is fine, but you do need to distinguish between the two types of video for everyone else.
mschuster91 6y ago
You're not the only one, and the worst examples are news sites. Pretty darn annoying if you're in a boring videocall, want to read some news and then suddenly your speaker blaring ads reminds everyone you're not paying attention...
grishka 6y ago
Video players, or at least media files themselves, are often hosted on a separate domain. You have to find it in uBO and block it.
cactus2093 6y ago
The much bigger problem for me is I can't really go to any news site without the full page being hijacked blocking the content until I turn off my adblocker. I feel like adblockers are becoming less and less useful overall, even as they become more widespread and more advanced, because I have to turn them off to see anything on the internet. Am I the only one with that issue?

tome 6y ago

Isn't the small video in the corner a feature actually implemented in Firefox itself (picture-in-picture) and nothing to do with the web page? If so then that seems doubly bad!

calmworm 6y ago
Firefox doesn't force it. The feature is that you have the option to pull the embedded video into a non static location within your browser window. So you could allow the video to play in view while you scroll through the remainder of the page.
ric2b 6y ago
No, the Firefox PiP requires you to click a blue icon, it doesn't activate automatically when you scroll off the video.

floatingatoll 6y ago

If you temporarily set about:config "image.animation_mode" to the value "none", and then restart Firefox, does it stop that video from autoplaying? If so, it's because they're using an animated GIF, which isn't a video. (You can right-click the value you modified in about:config to Reset it back to the default, so that animated GIFs work again, after you're done testing that.)

Shacklz 6y ago

> but somehow, news sites have a video that plays This is so annoying, engaging in such obviously obnoxious UX patterns should be regulated and punished with fines when user-intent tries to be circumvented. The "just dont visit that website lol"-trope really doesn't cut it anymore; operating a news paper organization nowadays is such a cutthroat business that you simply can't not do it if your competition does it, there really needs to be regulation to level the playing field to stop this kind of bullshit

symlinkk 6y ago
It’s the free market working as intended - if most people cared, the first site to stop doing auto playing videos would get more traffic and other sites would follow. As of right now, the benefit of auto playing videos outweighs the cost of pissing off the few users who care.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  The free market is the best algorithm for hill-climbing a society into feudalism, one A/B test at a time.
  - sequoia 6y ago
    Can you expand on this? I'm curious what you mean.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      This topic really deserves an essay, but I'll try to give a few of the seed crystals for my thoughts: - There's no real mechanism in the free market for long-term goal setting, apart from massive capital or collective action. Collective action is pretty hard to organize without capital. - People have vices and virtues. Long-term thinking tends to lead to better outcomes. Long-term thinking tends toward virtues. Short-term instinct tends toward vices. See e.g. the marshmallow experiment. - A/B tests and the concept of "revealed preference" optimize for vice without regard to long-term good. If you ask a smoker if they want to quit, they'll often say yes. But their "revealed preference" shows that they want to keep smoking. So "revealed preference" optimizes for vice. - There's a feedback cycle between the most effective micro-optimizers and the accumulation of capital. So those who have the most money, can afford the most micro-optimizations. And those micro-optimizations favor the holders of the capital at the expense of society at large. Thus we are gradually optimizing ourselves into the will and control of the wealthy, AKA feudalism. We can see this playing out in operating systems, too. Windows, despite MS's antitrust sins, and much as the Slashdot crowd loved to hate it, used to be very focused on compatibility and widespread use. There used to be a saying, "80% of your users only use 20% of your features, but they all use a different 20%". Now everything's gone from focus groups to telemetry. In other words, from planning and virtue, to reactionism and "revealed preference". Anything not used by 100% of users, or anything that doesn't favor the holders of the keys, is at risk of being destroyed in the next automatic update.

Santosh83 6y ago

Indeed am seeing more and more sites that somehow get their videos to autoplay even though I have that explicitly disabled in Firefox settings. I thought user agents had ultimate control over 'mere bytes' sent over the wire but somehow these sites manage to trick the browser and override user preferences.

ffpip 6y ago
If a <video> tag is attached to the Video, Firefox stops it. Sites are loading videos in frames (looking at you Reddit) and in GIFs (news sites)
- jagged-chisel 6y ago
  Wouldn't the frame also be a valid HTML page, with a <video> tag? Perhaps I'm mistaken about how things are working these days, so I'd appreciate some learnin'.

calmworm 6y ago

... then when you do manage to tap/click the X, on some sites it says "closing video..." for 3 more seconds before it closes. Also very annoying.

danShumway 6y ago

Short version of a long story! A few years ago Google implemented autoplay blocking in Chrome. It was designed to fix problems like this, but was riddled with issues. I wrote about it at https://danshumway.com/blog/chrome-autoplay/ https://danshumway.com/blog/chrome-autoplay/. The spec evolved a little bit since then, so not everything in that post is up to date, but most of the core problems still remain (or did the last time I checked). Firefox was forced to follow suit, and to their credit their spec was a lot more sensible, but it was really only papering over the problems in the Chrome spec. It wasn't at a fundamental level thinking about video/audio differently than Chrome was, it was just trying to do the same thing minus the egregiously bad decisions. I feel like a lot of the problems with hijacked interactions on the web can be traced back to spec histories like this. A good implementation of video/audio blocking: - wouldn't reveal to the page that audio was blocked, it would either silently mute the audio or refuse to render the video without reporting an error. - wouldn't have exceptions based around trying to interpret user intent or (in Chrome's case) exceptions based on how you navigated to the page. - wouldn't try to distinguish between things like GIFs, animated backgrounds, and videos (they're all moving pictures that use data and distract motion-sensitive users, you don't need to treat them differently) My (subjective) opinion is that video autoplaying never really got better because we never really tackled the problem correctly from the start, and since then we've just been continuing to apply band-aides on top of a fundamentally broken strategy. > am I the only one? Depending on how much you hate this and how much effort you're willing to put into getting rid of it, disabling 3rd-party Javascript will fix the problem on most news sites. Nearly all of them that I run into load the Javascript to run the player from a separate script being served from a separate subdomain or CDN. It's usually possible (even for news sites that require Javascript) to block that script in specific, or load just enough Javascript to get the page rendering and nothing else.

NoodleIncident 6y ago
> wouldn't try to distinguish between things like GIFs, animated backgrounds, and videos (they're all moving pictures that use data and distract motion-sensitive users, you don't need to treat them differently) This would cause 95% of users to correctly say that your browser is "broken", regardless of the opinions of motion-sensitive users on tiny data connections. Having a nuclear option for just these people is fine, but you do need to distinguish between the two types of video for everyone else.

mschuster91 6y ago

You're not the only one, and the worst examples are news sites. Pretty darn annoying if you're in a boring videocall, want to read some news and then suddenly your speaker blaring ads reminds everyone you're not paying attention...

grishka 6y ago

Video players, or at least media files themselves, are often hosted on a separate domain. You have to find it in uBO and block it.

cactus2093 6y ago

The much bigger problem for me is I can't really go to any news site without the full page being hijacked blocking the content until I turn off my adblocker. I feel like adblockers are becoming less and less useful overall, even as they become more widespread and more advanced, because I have to turn them off to see anything on the internet. Am I the only one with that issue?