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Google has removed the option to disable autoplay from Mobile Chrome
- znpy 6y agoGoogle continues the war against its own users.
- sg47 6y agoIndeed. A list of Google's decisions that drive me crazy. 1. Killing Google Reader 2. Removing swipe from Google News feed (both Chrome homepage and News feed in Android that's part of the launcher) 3. Deprecating Google Play Music and switching to Youtube Music (the interface is horrible and intended for videos). I'm a paying user of Google Play Music and this is idiotic. 4. Random recommendations in Youtube, especially more of the same. I have to open one-off videos in a private window so that I don't get recommendations 5. Minor changes in G Suite that make no sense (I'm forgetting what these are at the moment) 6. Showing ads for everything even when I'm just looking for medical information 7. GBoard suddenly asking me to add misspelled words to the dictionary 8. Google Maps interface changes (all the freaking time) I really wish Google would send all its PMs on a sabbatical for a while so that I can go about using these products in peace without random changes.
- londons_explore 6y agoGoogle reader only had 2 million users. They just happen to be the 2 million most vocal people in tech circles...
- Gibbon1 6y ago'only'
- darkwizard42 6y agoThere are over 2 billion MAU on Google Maps...so for Google, yes its only... It wasn't sustainable
- Gibbon1 6y agoMost normal companies are okay with small divisions. Sometimes they'll sell them off. It feels like Google is like Intel. They reflexively kill anything that isn't going to be worth a few hundred million in revenue.
- muratsu 6y agoAlphabet has a revenue per employee of $1.5M. In order to keep that number they need big hits. That's why small products just get abandoned / die.
- csande17 6y agoI'm now thinking about the math here. If they put Reader in maintenance mode, even with big-company inefficiency it'd probably only take three full-time engineers to keep it running. That means that they'd need revenue of $4.5M per year to stay competitive with other Google departments. That's less than $3 per user. Google can't squeeze $3/year in ad revenue out of a product used primarily by wealthy plugged-in tech types?
- smegger001 6y agothere are several dozen countries with lower populations that that.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- yoz-y 6y agoDisclaimer: I work for Google 1. I was annoyed at killing reader too. However, in hindsight before we had Google reader and that was it. Now there is Feedly, Feedbin and multiple self hosted aggregators. And a plethora of RSS clients. RSS did not “die” because of lack of tech around it but because majority prefers twitter and Facebook. Had Reader stayed, would people be lamenting its dominant position?
- hoseja 6y agoNot if it stayed a user-friendly tool. Which it probably wouldn't.
- doublerabbit 6y agoAs your a google employee, whats the reason of google suddenly implementing YouTube "Sign in to continue" popups when I try to use YouTube? I have cookies disabled however, with that, it means I then get the popup every single time I play the video.
- egberts1 6y agoNeed to drag in the entire clusterf*ck of CDNs hosting ads that accompanies with each YouTube video because ... revenue.
- yalogin 6y agoThis is weird. They see the general tech community slowly turning against them and they double down on all the wrong things they were doing that caused the negativity.
- ggoo 6y agoIt's pretty difficult to change your momentum, product at google has decided on a direction and it will take a lot change that.
- emilsedgh 6y agoOr maybe higher levels have had a cost/benefit analysis before letting this happen?
- adrianmonk 6y agoThen that's bad product management. Staying the course is one thing, but realizing you're off course is also important. Google needs to improve its ability to lead. Which is not the same thing as being wedded to an idea and insular.
- octoberfranklin 6y agoSee "Google Plus"
- untog 6y agoThe general tech community is a tiny fraction of their user base, though. Put simply, they don’t care.
- airstrike 6y agoI subscribe to the idea that the tech community overlaps with the definition of "early adopters", who become zealots driving everyone else's adoption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle
- bfuclusion 6y agoI can't have Ublock origin, so mobile chrome is already a shit show.
- lettergram 6y agoFirefox on android did have the option to have ublock as an extension (luckily)
- bfuclusion 6y agoYeah, which is why I stick with it even though they just butchered a few areas of the UI (most notably the home screen). Fortunately they seem to be listening to reviews and fixing things.
- pteraspidomorph 6y agoDoes anyone know if there is a way in the new Firefox for Android to stop it from keeping my tabs open when I close the window without using "Quit"?
- snoshy 6y agoYes, there's an option in Settings to close open tabs on quit.
- pteraspidomorph 6y agoThank you for trying to help, but I think you missed a part of the question.
- snoshy 6y agoAh, you're right. No, there isn't an option to do this without explicitly Quitting. I find it a glaring omission myself, along with the fact that deleting Browsing History and Site Data are combined into a single option.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Animats 6y agoFührer command! Suffer us to obey!
- chromeengineer3 6y agoI was curious about the rationale for this, so I did a quick search on chrome's issue tracker [1]. According to https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1063649#c8 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=106364..., it was removed because it didn't actually stop sites from autoplaying video: > full autoplay blocking is counter productive as images and <canvas> can do "video" playback just fine. We had this issue on mobile and ended up enabling muted autoplay there to avoid that issues.We found many websites having 100MB gifs that could be one order of magnitude smaller when implemented as <video autoplay muted>. (Disclaimer: I work on Chrome at Google, but not on media.) [1]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list?q=media%20site%20settings&can=1 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list?q=media%20s...
- userbinator 6y agoI notice your comment just a second after I posted this comment that suggests a reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24403934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24403934 ...and it turns out I was right! "It doesn't work all the time, let's remove it." Frankly, I really really hate that attitude.
- duskwuff 6y agoWell... not so much "it doesn't work all the time", but "publishers are reacting to the existence of this option by using grossly inefficient alternatives which we can't block".
- userbinator 6y agoThen let them...! At least the option would have some effect, now it has none. That is clearly a worse situation than before. Fuck this idiotic slow boiling of the users.
- beervirus 6y agoExcept the alternatives can be blocked.
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- GPUboy 6y agoThis could also just be a mistake. There's often regressions or bugs in mobile chrome.
- creato 6y agoI mean, the issue literally is that the option exists, it just doesn't work. It doesn't sound intentional. But then again, it was reported 9 months ago. It should have been fixed by now.
- userbinator 6y agothe option exists, it just doesn't work It might not be true in this instance, but I've seen so many times where "the option doesn't fully work and hasn't been working for a while, so let's just remove it entirely" has happened to features in other products.
- untog 6y agoThere’s a [dead] post here from a Chrome engineer that links to the relevant Chrome issue: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1063649#c8 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=106364... > full autoplay blocking is counter productive as images and <canvas> can do "video" playback just fine. We had this issue on mobile and ended up enabling muted autoplay there to avoid that issues.We found many websites having 100MB gifs that could be one order of magnitude smaller when implemented as <video autoplay muted>. The logic kind of makes sense. Autoplay videos already have to be muted so there’s no issue with sound. And if you disable video then idiot ad providers will resort to alternatives that chew up considerably more bandwidth and/or CPU. I guess they need a setting to disable all canvas tags and GIFs and all autoplay videos.
- Gibbon1 6y agoDoesn't slack look at the size of a gif and skip playing it if it's bigger than 4mb or something? I'm reminded of Steve Jobs comment on 'toner heads' and why Xerox failed. Google is now run by MBA's and Ad people. So they will continue to do things like this.
- untog 6y agoIt does, but the Slack servers still need to download the image first to know it’s size. There’s no equivalent for a browser. You could rely on Content-Length headers but then ad servers are just going to stop sending them.
- rietta 6y agoThis is Google though. It would seem that they could update Googlebot to penalize bypassing behaviors, lowering SERPS for any property that did such shenanigans. Or giving users in Chrome a Report Button that then filtered into site rankings.
- marcinzm 6y agoYou can download the first frame and then only download 4mb of the rest. If that's not the whole thing then don't download the rest. Or download up to 4mb and if there's more then ignore it and just pull the first frame from the 4mb. Or if the content-length isn't set then assume it's over 4mb and only download the first frame. Granted there's extra complexity in parsing the first frame from a gif in real time.
- jdc 6y agoIf you're looking to switch and Firefox isn't your cup of tea, you'd probably like Kiwi -- it's based on Chromium and it has an integrated ad-blocker. https://kiwibrowser.com https://kiwibrowser.com
- SXX 6y agoWhy it's not mentioned anywhere on website that it's open source? https://github.com/kiwibrowser/src https://github.com/kiwibrowser/src PS: Oops, another guy posted the link earler.
- spankalee 6y ago(disclaimer: I work at Google, not on Chrome) The rationale here seems to be that by blocking video autoplay, Chrome incentivized sites shipping huge animated GIFs, or decoding video in JS and painting to canvas, both of which are very suboptimal for users. Another comment points to this issue: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1063649#c8 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=106364... quote: Unfortunately, full autoplay blocking is counter productive as images and <canvas> can do "video" playback just fine. We had this issue on mobile and ended up enabling muted autoplay there to avoid that issues.We found many websites having 100MB gifs that could be one order of magnitude smaller when implemented as <video autoplay muted>. endquote This seems like a case of "the more you squeeze, the more sand trickles through your fingers?". Sites already have a way of always autoplaying muted video, but it involves either shipping 10x the bytes, or spending huge amounts of CPU and battery on decoding in JS. Might as well let them autoplay muted video and save the user's network/CPU/battery.
- netsharc 6y agoHuh, if it were my software I'd add the option of allowing 100MB GIFs or only on demand, and whether the browser should automatically stream blobs for the canvas or not...
- SXX 6y agoThere are ways to bypass it. You can always stream 1MB of data from 100 different domains.
- userbinator 6y agoRegardless, the solution is not to (explicitly, i.e. removing the option was a conscious effort) give up.
- SXX 6y agoI guess it's just like discussion about Do-Not-Track where having these headers actually make it easier to track you for malicious actors.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- paulie_a 6y agoYouTube Android now seems to autoplay but not when you are casting. I haven't looked into it, who knows I might have flipped the switch. But previously they would or would not autoplay on both as far as I can recall
- luxurycommunism 6y agoA feature that never worked in the first place. The flag has always been a placebo. Nothing of value was lost.
- donohoe 6y agoClearly Google was listening to the hoards of users who were incessant in asking that auto-play be mandatory without exception. (I know, sarcasm is lowest form of humor)
- josefx 6y agoGoogles users are companies that buy ads, so no need for sarcasm.
- debuggingnoob 6y agoThis thread is a microcosm of the problems with the world at large atm. 70% of the response are people frothing at the mouth outrages over those evil "other people" when the other people had nothing but good intentions. Then absolutely refusing to see those good intentions and painting everything as poorly as possible.
- beervirus 6y agoI’m not sure Google is entitled to any charitable opinions at this point.
- Spivak 6y agoWhy? The engineers in the bug tracker seem to be making this change specifically to improve user experience. Trying to plug the hole by blocking gifs, canvas, and whatever people would think of next seems worse than just letting them do the right thing. Google is a huge company with very little of what could be considered a unified vision. It doesn’t make that much sense to talk about Google as a single unit but as many teams with vague corporate influences. I think it’s reasonable to be a little conservative when any decision you make has to work for billions of installs and every unknown website.
- userbinator 6y ago"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
- mindfulhack 6y agoThe road to heaven is also paved with bad ones. (megachurch pastor conmen)
- bryan_w 6y agoSo true. Add in the old-school absolutists that believe that everything more complicated than links should be banned and that people should play videos by interpreting the raw octet stream, and it makes up pretty much everyone in this thread.
- dmitryminkovsky 6y agoA lot of comments here trying to explain this away but let me point out that Apple disabled autoplaying unmuted videos in moble Safari years ago (it's not even behind a setting as far as I know) and I can't imagine them backing off of that any time soon. On the contrary, Apple will savage decades old APIs just to marginally improve privacy [0]. Which is what Google would do if users were the customer. Apple is problematic in many ways, but I'm glad there's at least one mega-corporation that's really staked out privacy and user experience as a selling point for paying customers. [0] https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie-blocking-and-more/ https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie-blocki...
- ehsankia 6y ago> autoplaying unmuted videos autoplaying unmuted videos have been disabled on almost every browser, on desktop and on mobile, for years. This isn't unique to Safari and Apple. This is specifically about autoplaying muted videos, which gifs and canvas can replace.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoSo block autoplaying animated gifs and canvas animations?
- untog 6y agoIn the canvas case it wouldn’t block the huge downloads, it would just stop them being visible.
- kikokikokiko 6y agoJust by not being visible it would already be a better experience for the user.
- esperent 6y agoYou might be surprised how few users agree with you on this point - or rather, care enough to engage in the conversation at all. Blocking non-muted video is something most people are happy about. Blocking mute animations, I don't think many people are gonna waste much energy caring about it.
- gruez 6y agotangentially related: what's everyone's solution for blocking autoplaying sticky videos? By that I mean the kind that usually shows up on news sites or tech blogs. It usually manifests as a "recommended" video that's totally unrelated to the article at hand, and stars playing without you clicking the play button. If you scroll past the video, many of them convert to a sticky mini player that stays around wherever you scroll. I've tried changing the autoplay setting from "block audio" to "block audio and video", but that breaks sites, especially the ones that assume you have autoplay enabled and don't have controls available. It's also hard to know when something's broken. I see a static image and I'm left to wonder whether it's a video that's hasn't started yet or it's actually a picture. For some sites, blocking autoplay don't even prevent the videos from loading because they start video playback during an onScroll event, which makes the browser think the playback was user-initiated.
- beervirus 6y agoAd blocking.
- swiley 6y agoMy solution is to remember what site it is and never ever visit them again because that’s totally unacceptable. If for some reason you absolutely have to spend time on a broken site like that it’s pretty easy to delete the video (or dickbar or ad or whatever) with the web inspector. In general links to anything other than eg lkml or lwn make me pretty uncomfortable tbf.
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- RedComet 6y agoI consider browser video autoplay more offensive than physical assault tbh.
- judge2020 6y agoBrowser autoplay doesn't have the real-world consequence of needing medical attention and going thousands of dollars into debt.
- userbinator 6y ago...unless it triggers photosensitive epilepsy... which I wouldn't be surprised if some of the more obnoxious ads out there do.
- RedComet 6y agoNeither does a black eye.
- ulucs 6y ago> going thousands of dollars into debt That is the case for only a single country in the whole world
- Fede_V 6y agoWhy not allow users to specify that they do not want any site with autoplay videos (in any shape) to show up in their top results? Alternatively - when Google shows a search result, indicate if the website has autoplay videos, this way I can avoid clicking it.
- coronadisaster 6y agoe option to disable autoplay on YOUTUbE was already somewhat hidden so that is not a big surprise....
- thayne 6y agoThe cynic in me wonders about the timing of this happening shortly after backlash against the new Firefox mobile, and Mozilla lay-offs.
- pvg 6y agoThis change has been part of Chrome for many months. Look at the date on the report, for one.
- causality0 6y agoThe Chrome Team really needs to be broken away from Google.
- pb7 6y agoWho is going to pay them?
- lvs 6y agoCorporate users.
- josefx 6y agoFirefox did well enough until chrome came along. It even managed to keep up until the recent downsizing. In other words your comment only makes sense if you just woke up from a thirty year long coma.
- pb7 6y agoIt did well enough until there was real competition? Firefox is only alive from fat Google Search checks. It’s a great example of a massive failure in this charity business model.
- josefx 6y agoGiven that Microsoft almost killed the entire browser industry just by releasing IE it is quite a success to be around decades later. > It did well enough until there was real competition "Real" competition doesn't have to artificially cripple high profile sites to compete. The chrome style of competition gave us ShadowDom v0 on youtube, disappearing features in maps and gmail, empty html elements that only seemed to be there to prevent Edge from accelerating video playback and constant popups reminding users to "upgrade" to Chrome.
- dredmorbius 6y ago"Nobody" would be a better situation than we have now. (Microsoft and Brave both depend on Chrome, however.)
- lvs 6y agoThe solution I've found is just to disable javascript altogether, then manually whitelist a small number of sites that don't work without js. Sure, a lot of the web stops working for me, but it's also probably the part of the web I don't want to see anymore anyway.
- aembleton 6y agoJust disabling 3rd party JS solves a lot of the problems. Still have to whitelist a lot, but it is easier than blocking which just feels like whack-a-mole.
- bad_user 6y agoI don’t understand what’s the problem with auto-playing muted video. Facebook and Twitter have been doing it in their apps. The mobile apps are more popular than the web pages. The exodus to native apps has already been happening. The web has evolved from the days of static text content, like it or hate it, if you stop the progress, the web will die. And really, some suggestions don’t make sense. Stopping the auto-playing of GIFs? That’s the whole point of GIFs, and you’re 15 years too late.
- kelnos 6y agoI don't get why Firefox's market share is still so low when compared to Chrome's. I get why FF fell behind over the last decade, but since Firefox Quantum those reasons have largely disappeared.
- octoberfranklin 6y agoFrom a tech geek perspective, Firefox is the "emacs of browsers". They wrote a (lisp/js) interpreter and then wrote the (editor/browser) in that language. Unfortunately using a much more weakly-typed language [to write what is almost an OS of its own] yielded a mass of unmaintainable, constantly-mutating bloatware. They claim to be rewriting the interpreter layer in Rust, which is awesome, but 99% of the browser will still be written in javascript. Plus, when I abandoned Firefox for good (about a year ago) pinch-to-zoom STILL DID NOT WORK. This was in 2019. Seriously. And they pay people to fiddle with VRML/WebVR instead of fixing all this.
- kelnos 6y agoNot sure where you're getting your information, but the majority of Firefox is written in C++, not Javascript.
- octoberfranklin 6y agohttps://www.openhub.net/p/firefox/analyses/latest/languages_summary https://www.openhub.net/p/firefox/analyses/latest/languages_... The vast, vast majority of that C++ is legacy crud that gets #ifdef'ed out -- Mozilla development style seems to be to never remove code, ever; just #ifdef it out. Also there's a ton of boilerplate in there due to their homegrown IDL.
- Termious 6y agoTechies don't like to think about it, but it's obvious. The only reason why Chrome has come to dominate the market is because Google leveraged their monopoly in search. And even beyond Google Search, if you used Google Mail or anything else by Google, they'd repeatedly put notifications telling you that Chrome is great and why don't you download it? Then there's using all those billions of dollars to pay everybody to help advertise Chrome by adding it to their installers as an opt-out. It's no wonder Chrome is everywhere, Google did their best to abuse their position to ensure that it was a foregone conclusion. I wonder more about why people accept their anti-competitive behavior when Microsoft was shafted for doing pretty much the same thing.
- Gallactide 6y agoSoooo google wants Autoplay ads on their sites too now! They're not about to make their own product limit their own whims!
- frouge 6y agoDon't be evil guys
- iamdual 6y agoThe real scandal is that people still using Google's Chrome.
- tus88 6y agoNot really. Just disable JS and you are good as gold. Even though JS is not technically required, find a website that doesn't load almost all media assets using JS. And when you occasionally need to use JS, just share the webpage with another browser like Edge that has JS enabled. Guru level mobile browsing.
- bambax 6y ago> How to fix before I abandon Chrome entirely? Why wait? Firefox on Android works fine and accepts extensions, including, yes, uBlock Origin. Your experience will be a million times better.
- vertis 6y agoAs much as I find Firefox less than user friendly at times (by comparison), it is worlds better when it comes to blocking unwanted items and putting the user first (For example Multi-account containers). I really wish that Chrome wasn't so dominant. Google has all it's incentives in the wrong place, and therefore can't be trusted to fight for the user.
- mobilemidget 6y agoI just noticed the first, Netflix like, 'are you still watching' challenge on YouTube, never had that before.
- weknowbetter 6y agoThis happens to me a lot, but my use case is "watching" full music albums all day. Usually halfway through every other album it will pause and ask I'm "still watching". I usually just use the media controls on my keyboard to un-pause it without actually clicking the modal.
- lumberingjack 6y agoabandon Chrome? oh nooooo!