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> wouldn't try to distinguish between things like GIFs, animated backgrounds, and videos (they're all moving pictures that use data and distract motion-sensitiv

> 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.

danShumway 6y ago
> Having a nuclear option for just these people is fine I think that would be fine, I'm certainly not against sensible defaults. But I don't think any browser currently has a good implementation of that nuclear option The distinction between video types shouldn't be something that's baked into the core design of the feature itself. As it stands, I have no idea how I'd even start to implement a good nuclear option on top of the current design of autoplay blocking. There are so many weird rules about what is and isn't allowed to work, and the end result is that the system is trivial to bypass. One of the criticisms I had when the system launched was that it's really not hard to make an autoplaying video even with these restrictions[0] -- clicking, highlighting, or pressing any keyboard key counts as a user action. Or if you're navigating within a domain, then your video is special and allowed to autoplay. The distinction between "this is probably an animated background image" and "this is probably a video banner" is fundamentally baked into the feature itself in a way that users can't customize or disable, and where its difficult for even the browser-makers themselves to expand on the feature of change it as the ecosystem evolves. Even the distinction between autoplay on page load and autoplay in general is a bad one to have so hard-coded into the design. Youtube is an SPA, so even though Firefox properly blocks autoplays while you're moving within a domain, that doesn't work on Youtube, because no actual navigation happens when you click a link in Youtube, so Firefox thinks you've already given the page permission to auto-start the video. That's a really inconsistent, bad user experience for nontechnical users who have no idea what an SPA is. [0]: See https://danshumway.com/blog/chrome-autoplay/demo/ https://danshumway.com/blog/chrome-autoplay/demo/ for a really simple implementation. If I'm building a news site and I want autoplaying ads, I'm pretty certain at some point while reading you're going to highlight some of the text on the page.

danShumway 6y ago

> Having a nuclear option for just these people is fine I think that would be fine, I'm certainly not against sensible defaults. But I don't think any browser currently has a good implementation of that nuclear option The distinction between video types shouldn't be something that's baked into the core design of the feature itself. As it stands, I have no idea how I'd even start to implement a good nuclear option on top of the current design of autoplay blocking. There are so many weird rules about what is and isn't allowed to work, and the end result is that the system is trivial to bypass. One of the criticisms I had when the system launched was that it's really not hard to make an autoplaying video even with these restrictions[0] -- clicking, highlighting, or pressing any keyboard key counts as a user action. Or if you're navigating within a domain, then your video is special and allowed to autoplay. The distinction between "this is probably an animated background image" and "this is probably a video banner" is fundamentally baked into the feature itself in a way that users can't customize or disable, and where its difficult for even the browser-makers themselves to expand on the feature of change it as the ecosystem evolves. Even the distinction between autoplay on page load and autoplay in general is a bad one to have so hard-coded into the design. Youtube is an SPA, so even though Firefox properly blocks autoplays while you're moving within a domain, that doesn't work on Youtube, because no actual navigation happens when you click a link in Youtube, so Firefox thinks you've already given the page permission to auto-start the video. That's a really inconsistent, bad user experience for nontechnical users who have no idea what an SPA is. [0]: See https://danshumway.com/blog/chrome-autoplay/demo/ https://danshumway.com/blog/chrome-autoplay/demo/ for a really simple implementation. If I'm building a news site and I want autoplaying ads, I'm pretty certain at some point while reading you're going to highlight some of the text on the page.