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A tangent but, a lot of google's sites disobey browser standards and rules like for example sound autoplay on load. When you visit https://santatracker.google.c
by sidyapa 6y ago
A tangent but, a lot of google's sites disobey browser standards and rules like for example sound autoplay on load. When you visit https://santatracker.google.com/ https://santatracker.google.com/ or youtube, it automatically plays sound without any user interaction, which is impossible for non Google sites to do
- silexia 6y agoWow, this is terrifying. I am a big supported of Google and dislike the recent attacks on FAANG, but this is shocking to me. If they are exempting themselves from this, what else could they be doing?!
- liveoneggs 6y agothey have always had whitelists for friends inside of chrome
- Hurdy 6y agoThe comment implies that this is somehow hardcoded just for Google sites, which is not true. Autoplay is allowed for sites with a high enough media engagement index. You can check chrome://media-engagement.
- orf 6y agoI loaded the page and went through a few actions, but I cannot see anything in chrome://media-engagement about it
- yreg 6y agoI do see Santa Tracker in mine, it gave it a score of 0.05, the same as the web of my high school and less than say knowyourmeme.com which sits at 0.1
- drawfloat 6y agoAnd media engagement is based on an opaque set of factors that just so happen to give top authority to Google sites.
- kerng 6y agoWell that's a nice way to say that its allowed for youtube and very few other sites... possibly none. These are the kind of tricks a shady company would do. So disappointed what Google is doing to the web the last few years.
- YawningAngel 6y agoI'm not so sure of that. My top sites by media engagement are: Spotify Twitch clips Youtube Twitch Eurosport Netflix The Independent Discord It isn't obvious to me from this that Google are privileging their own sites above others here
- spencercw 6y agoFor what it's worth, Netflix has a higher score on my machine than YouTube.
- kretor 6y agoNot "very few other sites", it's around 700 sites: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24819473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24819473
- teraflop 6y agoThe media engagement index is based on a user's past activity on a site, but Chrome has a special list of "preloaded" sites that are allowed to autoplay video even without any prior media engagement. The preloaded list is in the source code (https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/master/chrome/browser/resources/media/mei_preload/preloaded_data.pb https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/master/chrome/brow...) but it's encoded as a finite state automaton that makes it a bit difficult to enumerate the list of whitelisted domains.
- moneywoes 6y agoIs there no way to decode it
- verroq 6y agoTake a list of top X websites and enter it in every one. The preimage space is finite and easily enumerated.
- cpeterso 6y agoneatmonster wrote a script to decode the list and then shared links the results here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24819473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24819473
- stingraycharles 6y agoOne has to wonder whether they intentionally obfuscate this list. It sounds like they “trained” a browser, and captured the resulting state. I’m sure you can argue this makes things more fair (we trained it using real world behavior!), but I really can’t give them the benefit of the doubt anymore.
- kaszanka 6y agoIt's generated by a Python script [0] from a list of URLs, but the input list doesn't seem to be included in the Chromium source (only the binary output of this tool). [0] https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/615d5eed47c10d889003caf9271b91b8be05a98b/tools/media_engagement_preload/make_dafsa.py https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/615d5eed47c10d8890...
- amadeuspagel 6y agoAmazing. I once built a web app with autoplay, which worked for me, probably because I was using the app a lot which gave it high media engagement, but didn't work for others, and I never figured out the problem until now.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- vaccinator 6y agoThat site doesnt even load in my browser... I only see the Google wave (Firefox mobile v6x)... but on the other hand, there are Firefox extensions that make websites load as if you were using Chrome.
- circularfoyers 6y agoLoads for me on Firefox 81.1.3 on Android. It did take a little bit to load, so might just be your internet connection.
- vaccinator 6y agoIt did load this time but no sound
- robertlagrant 6y agoWhen you visit a Netflix content URL it automatically plays sound and moving pictures without any user interaction! Evidence of Google owning Netflix?
- nosianu 6y agoI read somewhere - I believe on HN actually, some time ago - that a number of high profile sites were exempted from this restriction, Netflix among them. Really, wasn't this a thread right here on HN, saying that this was anti-competitive, oligopoly essentially, making any other sites of smaller competitors and upstarts automatically worse off? I'm sure someone will be able to provide a link... There are other examples where only the large sites benefit while everybody else has to play by stricter rules: "EU Parliament bans geoblocking, exempts Netflix and other streaming services" -- https://www.dw.com/en/eu-parliament-bans-geoblocking-exempts-netflix-and-other-streaming-services/a-42475135 https://www.dw.com/en/eu-parliament-bans-geoblocking-exempts... EDIT: User teraflop posted a link to the list of "sites that are allowed to autoplay video even without any prior media engagement" right here in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24818178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24818178
- andrenotgiant 6y agoGoogle disobeys their own standards in MUCH worse ways. This year they are pushing a reduction in Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). https://web.dev/cls/ https://web.dev/cls/ But they purposefully use CLS in Search to increase clicks on Ads https://twitter.com/andyhattemer/status/1262564268890820609 https://twitter.com/andyhattemer/status/1262564268890820609
- andypants 6y agoThe android gmail app is horrible with this. They load a couple of your emails above ads so that the ads start on the second or third row. And the re-ordering happens as your mails and the ads are loading! You might be about to tap your email, then the ads load in and you suddenly click on an ad. Or you want to tap the top row, but the app decides to put a different email above the ads and you end up tapping into the wrong mail because it was reordered just before the tap.
- Madzen__ 6y agoYou get ads in gmail app? I have never seen ads there.
- tsbertalan 6y agoI've also never seen ads in the Gmail app. Maybe it's because of G Suite.
- IndexPointer 6y agoThere are ads on the Gmail app??
- lima 6y ago> But they purposefully use CLS in Search to increase clicks on Ads You present this as a fact, but it would be absurd that Google would use such a cheap and easily detected trick to increase CTR. It would be bordering on ad fraud and I'm sure that Google, of all companies, knows better than that. Occam's Razor says that this is a stupid async content loading bug, which they subsequently fixed. I've never seen this happen and when I just tried it without adblocker with that exact search term, it didn't - the page loaded with the ad.
- m463 6y agooutlook (via web) also seems to be able to play sounds, like meeting notification sounds in firefox.
- geofft 6y agoThis is not actually true. There are no shortage of random news sites that auto-play sound. Reddit does too. Does Google own all of them?
- speedgoose 6y agoReddit and Twitter starts video with muted sound on my browser (Edge). My guess from someone who had to develop a web video player at work, many websites will attempt to autoplay the video with sound and if it fails, it's easy to catch the failure event, they will mute the video and try again.
- geofft 6y agoI'm talking specifically about Chrome. There's no web standard that says what a browser must do about autoplay requests, and Chrome permits a large number of sites to autoplay with sound on. Web browsers are also capable of determining that autoplay on technically-not-load-but-automatic counts as autoplay. (There's even text in the spec about it.) In particular, they can tell whether it is in response to a user action/gesture on the site or not.
- speedgoose 6y agoChrome has some special logic about autoplay. The following page describes them, but I feel like it's a bit more complicated in more recent versions of Chrome. https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-policy-changes https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p...
- lima 6y ago> [...] which is impossible for non Google sites to do No, they don't. This is false. It's a mechanism called Media Engagement Index, Google properties have zero advantage, and any site can get a high score. Chrome ships with a preloaded MEI assembled from global telemetry data, which is then trained locally: https://www.chromium.org/audio-video/autoplay/autoplay-pre-seeding-in-chrome https://www.chromium.org/audio-video/autoplay/autoplay-pre-s...
- hrktb 6y agoYou are technically true. It just happens that Youtube is the dominant video platform and gets pre-loaded in the default seed. Would they have made the same choice of preloading a default seed if they had no properties in the seed ? who knows
- lima 6y agoThe whole point of Chrome is to push the web ecosystem forward such that Google can build better products on top of it.
- userbinator 6y agoThe whole point of Chrome is to push the web ecosystem towards Google such that Google can exert more control over it.
- lima 6y agoExactly. They were tired of Microsoft doing it badly and realized they couldn't build on someone else's platform.
- hrktb 6y agoThis is part of the plan, but I find this angle to give too much credit to Google. Once they reached a dominant ad network position their whole strategy has been “advancing the web is advancing our revenue”, and it bled into mobile to the point where building and maintaining a whole ecosystem for free makes sense as long as they stay the search and ad engine of choice (that’s the only thing they’ll fight to impose). Chrome is built in the same optics: push forward the web and webapps as long as search is theirs.