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(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

(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 ago
Huh, 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 ago
  There are ways to bypass it. You can always stream 1MB of data from 100 different domains.
  - userbinator 6y ago
    Regardless, the solution is not to (explicitly, i.e. removing the option was a conscious effort) give up.
    - SXX 6y ago
      I guess it's just like discussion about Do-Not-Track where having these headers actually make it easier to track you for malicious actors.
  - postalrat 6y ago
    Wouldn't be hard to show a prompt after 10 megs to allow any other data to be loaded.
userbinator 6y ago
Then maybe the solution is to also have the option turn off animated GIFs and perhaps frequent canvas repaints too; and not simply give up completely! In any case, just leaving the option alone so at least it has some effect like it did before, would still be better than essentially a full surrender.
- amluto 6y ago
  How about restricting the frame rate of all elements until some heuristic determines that the user has interacted with them?
  - ehsankia 6y ago
    Restricting framerate will still download the 100mb GIF. Also, so many parts of websites use gifs and canvas. If you start blocking those, you'll be hiding loading spinners, menus and more. You're adding ton and ton of complexity and going at war after something pretty silly. If a website is abusive and does shitty things, just don't use the website. After some point, it's no longer the browsers job to babysit the web. I completely agreed with autoplaying audio, but blocking video is just not worth it.
    - paulryanrogers 6y ago
      I'd like the option to abort downloading once a gif reaches the first full frame or 1MB. Whichever comes first. Looks like Chrome will never be that browser. Seriously gif is only used because it's autoplay predates widespread abuse of autoplay generally. Now is the time to put an end to it, at least as an option.
    - baybal2 6y ago
      > If a website is abusive and does shitty things, just don't use the website. What do you do if the aforementioned is not done by the website as such, but by some omnipresent, and hard to avoid 3rd party ad net? > After some point, it's no longer the browsers job to babysit the web. I completely agreed with autoplaying audio, but blocking video is just not worth it. Video is by far the heaviest piece of media out there. There is no practical means to reduce its loading time, especially on mobile. It simply cannot be considered an ordinary piece of page content. Lastly, people are sick and tired of video ads, and, particularly, obscene, bombastic, and blinking like no tomorrow ones.
simias 6y ago
That's what happens when you let anybody and their friends run arbitrary code on the user's CPU. Javascript running by default was the original sin, and now there's no going back. IMO it ought to have been opt-in for the websites that really need it (i.e. web apps I actually want to use, not any random page I happen to stumble upon). There's especially no going back for Google for whom it's very much a feature since they try to reimplement and replace the OS from within the browser.
- scrollaway 6y ago
  Animated gifs are not arbitrary code and require no javascript. You're not really making a point that actually counters GP...
  - boring_twenties 6y ago
    Animated gifs are obviously trivial to block, so it doesn't seem worth even addressing that. The other half of the GP talks about rendering directly to canvas, using JavaScript...
- Zarel 6y ago
  This comment was downvoted at the time I'm replying to it, but it's honestly the only reasonable objection here. The _only_ way to block autoplaying video is to block all animation, which means all of: - animated GIFs - nearly all JavaScript - CSS animation - partial rendering (showing the top part of a page before the entire page is done downloading) Everyone else calling for just blocking animated GIFs and canvas is just going to be hit by even more CPU and bandwidth intensive workarounds.
tasogare 6y ago
The gif excuse doesn’t make sense. If Google was really concerned about that they would also provided a way to block huge gif, in addition to auto-play video.
JoshTriplett 6y ago
On the contrary, better to let them be horribly inefficient, so that they're noticeably worse than alternatives that don't do that. The other problem, though, is that that makes adblockers a bigger performance win.
freeone3000 6y ago
Okay, then don't autoplay gifs and click-to-enable canvas. Webpages shouldn't be able to move before user interaction.
baybal2 6y ago
Man, who came with that idea? I really want to know the name of that product manager. It takes only one of those 4k video ads to kill my data package within seconds, with me not even having an idea of that happening. With amount of stuff you threw at adblock before, I can not keep assuming goodwill from your side. Your explanation about "giant gifs" is so disingenuous.
- untog 6y ago
  > It takes only one of those 4k video ads to kill my data package within seconds, with me not even having an idea of that happening. Right, but the point is that disabling autoplay video doesn’t stop that from happening. An ad network would use a canvas tag or a GIF instead. That’a not disingenuous reasoning, it’s exactly what they do! In your situation you need some kind of browser setting to limit download size, because that’s your problem. Not the method by which that huge amount of data is being presented on screen.
  - shakna 6y ago
    > Right, but the point is that disabling autoplay video doesn’t stop that from happening. An ad network would use a canvas tag or a GIF instead. That’a not disingenuous reasoning, it’s exactly what they do! Then deal with the canvas tag or GIF, like Firefox already has the capability to. Don't suddenly decide it isn't worth the effort.
- vezycash 6y ago
  If mobile web becomes significantly worse, Google will have evidence to back AMP. Intentionally releasing a virus to sell the cure their cure.
- kungato 6y ago
  I use the Firefox mobile option of not loading media on the site when not on wifi and it helps me stay on 300mb data plan easy
throwaway189262 6y ago
Publishers found gaping holes in their blocking and response is to give up. Firefox already has config options to disable image animations and canvas. I've had them on for ages and sites work fine. Maybe they can re-enable popup windows too since sites replaced them with interstitials long ago. Chrome's dominance needs to end, this is blatantly anti user. Google could have de-ranked sites with hostile behavior a decade ago and we wouldn't be dealing with any of this stuff. But they won't, because ad money.
- the_pwner224 6y ago
  > Google could have de-ranked sites with hostile behavior a decade ago and we wouldn't be dealing with any of this stuff. They already block what they consider to be 'bad' ads on websites. This is just them giving up because there's no strategic value in making a user-focused browser. chrome://settings/content/ads
  - an_opabinia 6y ago
    If publishers can’t make money off subs or ads in browsers, content will simply move to Facebook.
- lumberingjack 6y ago
  I dread updates from google for there apps they break and change stuff that majorly upsets my workflow all the time. The worst I can remember was the no longer unlock screen with google assistant updates like a few years ago. I was at the hospitable in the morning after that update and many sad handless people could not use their life lines because of a fucking update.
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
This doesn't pass the smell test, at all. This is the equivalent of saying "Oh no, spammers have discovered we're blocking emails with 'Viagra' in them so now they're spelling it 'V1agra', might as well give up and not try to block that penis enlargement spam." The user intent is clearly to not show large animations on the page without user consent. Seems just as easy to block large animated gifs, or canvas updates, with the same browser setting.
gumby 6y ago
Auto playing gifs are also distracting when reading text and I would love to be able to suppress them.
vezycash 6y ago
Two real reason for this: 1. Ads 2. Make the mobike web worse to shove AMP down our throats
paranorman 6y ago
If only there were some way to penalize bloated websites exhibiting anti-user behavior. /s
tmpz22 6y ago
Other then tracking and toy games what are legitimate use cases for canvas on big sites?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
danShumway 6y ago
I don't want to pile on the Chrome team for what is ultimately an at least somewhat sensible decision in the moment. And I 100% appreciate the context you're providing. But this is such a frustrating comment to read! The GIF/Canvas problem is something critics brought up when Chrome first introduced its automatic autoplay blocking. Chrome's autoplay blocking didn't go far enough to block all media types, and it had fundamental design flaws that made it easy to circumvent and easy for websites to detect when a video is blocked. Blocking autoplay was never about saving data -- there were always going to be these kinds of circumvention techniques. Data-saving solutions require different strategies. But because ultimately Chrome just wanted to do its own thing and get those positive press releases, and because the Chrome devs were trying to fix multiple unrelated problems at the same time, we got a really weird Frankenstein implementation instead of something sensible like auto-muting browser tabs on new domains by default. This is a result that could have been avoided by engaging more with the web community and spending more time up-front thinking about how the feature was going to be used in the wild. Instead it got rushed out because the Chrome dev team digs in its heels and gets combative whenever developers question their decisions. This result is especially frustrating with autoplay, because digging in heels and rushing the implementation didn't just leave us with a useless feature -- it broke functionality on a ton of websites, including Google's own search page. We got a hacky solution that was rolled out too early and that broke the web because Google insisted they needed an behaviorally-driven, complicated system with a bunch of weird rules and exceptions about when things would and wouldn't be able to play. And now all of the minor benefits from that system are getting removed and all of the justifications for breaking existing sites are apparently being rolled back -- but we're still left with a hacky solution that breaks websites. We got the worst of all possible worlds because the Chrome team is apparently just unable to engage with developer communities. As a web dev, I am low-key bitter about how this all played out. This is exactly why it's a bad idea to give the Chrome team so much outsized control over web standards. They broke almost every indie web game online, forced multiple engines to release updates, and this is what we're left with? Because nobody on the Chrome team was capable of predicting that advertisers were going to start shipping GIFs?
dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
Frankly, for me, the autoplay issue was the straw that broke the camel's back. With Firefox, I keep autoplay disabled and only enable it on some sites. Otherwise the browser becomes unusable, especially on some news websites. Therefore your explanations make little sense to me because this option works in Firefox perfectly - at least for me. What is funny is that when you search for "Chrome disable autoplay" one of the top results is the extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-autoplay-re/cafckninonjkogajnihihlnnimmkndgf https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-auto... - which adds srvtrck.com (blocked by uBlock origin) for each request. This is not the web browsing experience I want to live with.
logicallee 6y ago
>(disclaimer: I work at Google, not on Chrome) As an insider, do you think Google in 2020 would attempt to try to use its near-monopoly on search to force users to use other Google products they don't want and can't opt out of? (From the outside this is what it seems like to me, so curious what the feeling is like on the inside.) Thanks for your honesty.
happymellon 6y ago
Wouldn't they get penalised for having massive/slow page load requirements?
stjohnswarts 6y ago
Yeah but the sites that allow that garbage are 99% garbage. I want to block autoplay and can think of very very few things that slipped through. Particularly on news sites. I won't visit sites that allow stuff like that, and I'd bet that most people don't either. You shoudl optimize for those parts of your application that are most important and used most often. Amdahl's law

netsharc 6y ago

Huh, 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 ago
There are ways to bypass it. You can always stream 1MB of data from 100 different domains.
- userbinator 6y ago
  Regardless, the solution is not to (explicitly, i.e. removing the option was a conscious effort) give up.
  - SXX 6y ago
    I guess it's just like discussion about Do-Not-Track where having these headers actually make it easier to track you for malicious actors.
- postalrat 6y ago
  Wouldn't be hard to show a prompt after 10 megs to allow any other data to be loaded.

userbinator 6y ago

Then maybe the solution is to also have the option turn off animated GIFs and perhaps frequent canvas repaints too; and not simply give up completely! In any case, just leaving the option alone so at least it has some effect like it did before, would still be better than essentially a full surrender.

amluto 6y ago
How about restricting the frame rate of all elements until some heuristic determines that the user has interacted with them?
- ehsankia 6y ago
  Restricting framerate will still download the 100mb GIF. Also, so many parts of websites use gifs and canvas. If you start blocking those, you'll be hiding loading spinners, menus and more. You're adding ton and ton of complexity and going at war after something pretty silly. If a website is abusive and does shitty things, just don't use the website. After some point, it's no longer the browsers job to babysit the web. I completely agreed with autoplaying audio, but blocking video is just not worth it.
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    I'd like the option to abort downloading once a gif reaches the first full frame or 1MB. Whichever comes first. Looks like Chrome will never be that browser. Seriously gif is only used because it's autoplay predates widespread abuse of autoplay generally. Now is the time to put an end to it, at least as an option.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    > If a website is abusive and does shitty things, just don't use the website. What do you do if the aforementioned is not done by the website as such, but by some omnipresent, and hard to avoid 3rd party ad net? > After some point, it's no longer the browsers job to babysit the web. I completely agreed with autoplaying audio, but blocking video is just not worth it. Video is by far the heaviest piece of media out there. There is no practical means to reduce its loading time, especially on mobile. It simply cannot be considered an ordinary piece of page content. Lastly, people are sick and tired of video ads, and, particularly, obscene, bombastic, and blinking like no tomorrow ones.

simias 6y ago

That's what happens when you let anybody and their friends run arbitrary code on the user's CPU. Javascript running by default was the original sin, and now there's no going back. IMO it ought to have been opt-in for the websites that really need it (i.e. web apps I actually want to use, not any random page I happen to stumble upon). There's especially no going back for Google for whom it's very much a feature since they try to reimplement and replace the OS from within the browser.

scrollaway 6y ago
Animated gifs are not arbitrary code and require no javascript. You're not really making a point that actually counters GP...
- boring_twenties 6y ago
  Animated gifs are obviously trivial to block, so it doesn't seem worth even addressing that. The other half of the GP talks about rendering directly to canvas, using JavaScript...
Zarel 6y ago
This comment was downvoted at the time I'm replying to it, but it's honestly the only reasonable objection here. The _only_ way to block autoplaying video is to block all animation, which means all of: - animated GIFs - nearly all JavaScript - CSS animation - partial rendering (showing the top part of a page before the entire page is done downloading) Everyone else calling for just blocking animated GIFs and canvas is just going to be hit by even more CPU and bandwidth intensive workarounds.

tasogare 6y ago

The gif excuse doesn’t make sense. If Google was really concerned about that they would also provided a way to block huge gif, in addition to auto-play video.

JoshTriplett 6y ago

On the contrary, better to let them be horribly inefficient, so that they're noticeably worse than alternatives that don't do that. The other problem, though, is that that makes adblockers a bigger performance win.

freeone3000 6y ago

Okay, then don't autoplay gifs and click-to-enable canvas. Webpages shouldn't be able to move before user interaction.

baybal2 6y ago

Man, who came with that idea? I really want to know the name of that product manager. It takes only one of those 4k video ads to kill my data package within seconds, with me not even having an idea of that happening. With amount of stuff you threw at adblock before, I can not keep assuming goodwill from your side. Your explanation about "giant gifs" is so disingenuous.

untog 6y ago
> It takes only one of those 4k video ads to kill my data package within seconds, with me not even having an idea of that happening. Right, but the point is that disabling autoplay video doesn’t stop that from happening. An ad network would use a canvas tag or a GIF instead. That’a not disingenuous reasoning, it’s exactly what they do! In your situation you need some kind of browser setting to limit download size, because that’s your problem. Not the method by which that huge amount of data is being presented on screen.
- shakna 6y ago
  > Right, but the point is that disabling autoplay video doesn’t stop that from happening. An ad network would use a canvas tag or a GIF instead. That’a not disingenuous reasoning, it’s exactly what they do! Then deal with the canvas tag or GIF, like Firefox already has the capability to. Don't suddenly decide it isn't worth the effort.
vezycash 6y ago
If mobile web becomes significantly worse, Google will have evidence to back AMP. Intentionally releasing a virus to sell the cure their cure.
kungato 6y ago
I use the Firefox mobile option of not loading media on the site when not on wifi and it helps me stay on 300mb data plan easy

throwaway189262 6y ago

Publishers found gaping holes in their blocking and response is to give up. Firefox already has config options to disable image animations and canvas. I've had them on for ages and sites work fine. Maybe they can re-enable popup windows too since sites replaced them with interstitials long ago. Chrome's dominance needs to end, this is blatantly anti user. Google could have de-ranked sites with hostile behavior a decade ago and we wouldn't be dealing with any of this stuff. But they won't, because ad money.

the_pwner224 6y ago
> Google could have de-ranked sites with hostile behavior a decade ago and we wouldn't be dealing with any of this stuff. They already block what they consider to be 'bad' ads on websites. This is just them giving up because there's no strategic value in making a user-focused browser. chrome://settings/content/ads
- an_opabinia 6y ago
  If publishers can’t make money off subs or ads in browsers, content will simply move to Facebook.
lumberingjack 6y ago
I dread updates from google for there apps they break and change stuff that majorly upsets my workflow all the time. The worst I can remember was the no longer unlock screen with google assistant updates like a few years ago. I was at the hospitable in the morning after that update and many sad handless people could not use their life lines because of a fucking update.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

This doesn't pass the smell test, at all. This is the equivalent of saying "Oh no, spammers have discovered we're blocking emails with 'Viagra' in them so now they're spelling it 'V1agra', might as well give up and not try to block that penis enlargement spam." The user intent is clearly to not show large animations on the page without user consent. Seems just as easy to block large animated gifs, or canvas updates, with the same browser setting.

gumby 6y ago

Auto playing gifs are also distracting when reading text and I would love to be able to suppress them.

vezycash 6y ago

Two real reason for this: 1. Ads 2. Make the mobike web worse to shove AMP down our throats

paranorman 6y ago

If only there were some way to penalize bloated websites exhibiting anti-user behavior. /s

tmpz22 6y ago

Other then tracking and toy games what are legitimate use cases for canvas on big sites?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

danShumway 6y ago

I don't want to pile on the Chrome team for what is ultimately an at least somewhat sensible decision in the moment. And I 100% appreciate the context you're providing. But this is such a frustrating comment to read! The GIF/Canvas problem is something critics brought up when Chrome first introduced its automatic autoplay blocking. Chrome's autoplay blocking didn't go far enough to block all media types, and it had fundamental design flaws that made it easy to circumvent and easy for websites to detect when a video is blocked. Blocking autoplay was never about saving data -- there were always going to be these kinds of circumvention techniques. Data-saving solutions require different strategies. But because ultimately Chrome just wanted to do its own thing and get those positive press releases, and because the Chrome devs were trying to fix multiple unrelated problems at the same time, we got a really weird Frankenstein implementation instead of something sensible like auto-muting browser tabs on new domains by default. This is a result that could have been avoided by engaging more with the web community and spending more time up-front thinking about how the feature was going to be used in the wild. Instead it got rushed out because the Chrome dev team digs in its heels and gets combative whenever developers question their decisions. This result is especially frustrating with autoplay, because digging in heels and rushing the implementation didn't just leave us with a useless feature -- it broke functionality on a ton of websites, including Google's own search page. We got a hacky solution that was rolled out too early and that broke the web because Google insisted they needed an behaviorally-driven, complicated system with a bunch of weird rules and exceptions about when things would and wouldn't be able to play. And now all of the minor benefits from that system are getting removed and all of the justifications for breaking existing sites are apparently being rolled back -- but we're still left with a hacky solution that breaks websites. We got the worst of all possible worlds because the Chrome team is apparently just unable to engage with developer communities. As a web dev, I am low-key bitter about how this all played out. This is exactly why it's a bad idea to give the Chrome team so much outsized control over web standards. They broke almost every indie web game online, forced multiple engines to release updates, and this is what we're left with? Because nobody on the Chrome team was capable of predicting that advertisers were going to start shipping GIFs?

dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago

Frankly, for me, the autoplay issue was the straw that broke the camel's back. With Firefox, I keep autoplay disabled and only enable it on some sites. Otherwise the browser becomes unusable, especially on some news websites. Therefore your explanations make little sense to me because this option works in Firefox perfectly - at least for me. What is funny is that when you search for "Chrome disable autoplay" one of the top results is the extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-autoplay-re/cafckninonjkogajnihihlnnimmkndgf https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-auto... - which adds srvtrck.com (blocked by uBlock origin) for each request. This is not the web browsing experience I want to live with.

logicallee 6y ago

>(disclaimer: I work at Google, not on Chrome) As an insider, do you think Google in 2020 would attempt to try to use its near-monopoly on search to force users to use other Google products they don't want and can't opt out of? (From the outside this is what it seems like to me, so curious what the feeling is like on the inside.) Thanks for your honesty.

happymellon 6y ago

Wouldn't they get penalised for having massive/slow page load requirements?

stjohnswarts 6y ago

Yeah but the sites that allow that garbage are 99% garbage. I want to block autoplay and can think of very very few things that slipped through. Particularly on news sites. I won't visit sites that allow stuff like that, and I'd bet that most people don't either. You shoudl optimize for those parts of your application that are most important and used most often. Amdahl's law