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I 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/det

I 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Well... 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 ago
    Then 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 ago
    Except the alternatives can be blocked.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  How so? It's not only that it doesn't work, but that it is actively making the web worse.
javieranton 6y ago
Sry for harassing here. If someone could look at the recent Android Webview v85 bug that has broken my app, that would be great. I raised a bug today for it https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1125525#c3 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=112552...
- EE84M3i 6y ago
  >Sry for harassing here. If someone could look at the recent Android Webview v85 bug that has broken my app, that would be great. I raised a bug today for it https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1125525 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=112552... Asking on HN for a random chrome engineer using a fresh throwaway (created for this specific post) to look at your 11 hour old low priority performance bug for a specific piece of hardware seems misguided. There are hundreds of engineers working on Chrome -- it is extremely unlikely this person is the right SME for this bug, and even if they were, how could they possibly do anything to your bug internally without revealing their identity?
  - brainfog 6y ago
    Pinging a bug five minutes after filing it is also an ...interesting... approach.
  - javieranton 6y ago
    That may be obvious to you. I had never filled a Chromium bug before and didn't know whether they were going to even have a look at it. Lookin g at the bug link you can see how widespread the damage was because of the recent update. It affected lots of people and its effects were that fps were down to 5 from 60 so yeah, pretty bad. Google doesn't really give a damn in certain areas (i.e. API) where their support is non existent unless you are sone type of VIP. So apologies for coming here with this, I guess I didnt know as much about Chromium bugs process as you do
missblit 6y ago
That's an argument for disabling large GIF autoplay or tying it to the autoplay setting, not for removing the autoplay setting entirely! Though I guess in the extreme case a webpage could have a huge grid of 1x1px divs that change color in a requestAnimationFrame callback based on data retrieved over XHR. So I can kinda see their point of view. It still seems a bit too far in the other direction if you ask me though. ... But enough grumbling. I wanted to point out the following documents for more context: https://blog.chromium.org/2017/09/unified-autoplay.html https://blog.chromium.org/2017/09/unified-autoplay.html (Somewhat wordsmithed...) https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/audio-video/autoplay https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/audio-video/auto... https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EH7qZatVnTXsBGvQc_53R97Z0xqm6zRblKg3eVmNp30/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EH7qZatVnTXsBGvQc_53R97Z...

userbinator 6y ago

I 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 ago
Well... 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 ago
  Then 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 ago
  Except the alternatives can be blocked.
ehsankia 6y ago
How so? It's not only that it doesn't work, but that it is actively making the web worse.

javieranton 6y ago

Sry for harassing here. If someone could look at the recent Android Webview v85 bug that has broken my app, that would be great. I raised a bug today for it https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1125525#c3 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=112552...

EE84M3i 6y ago
>Sry for harassing here. If someone could look at the recent Android Webview v85 bug that has broken my app, that would be great. I raised a bug today for it https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1125525 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=112552... Asking on HN for a random chrome engineer using a fresh throwaway (created for this specific post) to look at your 11 hour old low priority performance bug for a specific piece of hardware seems misguided. There are hundreds of engineers working on Chrome -- it is extremely unlikely this person is the right SME for this bug, and even if they were, how could they possibly do anything to your bug internally without revealing their identity?
- brainfog 6y ago
  Pinging a bug five minutes after filing it is also an ...interesting... approach.
- javieranton 6y ago
  That may be obvious to you. I had never filled a Chromium bug before and didn't know whether they were going to even have a look at it. Lookin g at the bug link you can see how widespread the damage was because of the recent update. It affected lots of people and its effects were that fps were down to 5 from 60 so yeah, pretty bad. Google doesn't really give a damn in certain areas (i.e. API) where their support is non existent unless you are sone type of VIP. So apologies for coming here with this, I guess I didnt know as much about Chromium bugs process as you do

missblit 6y ago

That's an argument for disabling large GIF autoplay or tying it to the autoplay setting, not for removing the autoplay setting entirely! Though I guess in the extreme case a webpage could have a huge grid of 1x1px divs that change color in a requestAnimationFrame callback based on data retrieved over XHR. So I can kinda see their point of view. It still seems a bit too far in the other direction if you ask me though. ... But enough grumbling. I wanted to point out the following documents for more context: https://blog.chromium.org/2017/09/unified-autoplay.html https://blog.chromium.org/2017/09/unified-autoplay.html (Somewhat wordsmithed...) https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/audio-video/autoplay https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/audio-video/auto... https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EH7qZatVnTXsBGvQc_53R97Z0xqm6zRblKg3eVmNp30/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EH7qZatVnTXsBGvQc_53R97Z...