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And on the other hand one of the biggest annoyances of the web - autoplaying videos - is enabled by default! Clearly shows that you cannot please everyone with

And on the other hand one of the biggest annoyances of the web - autoplaying videos - is enabled by default! Clearly shows that you cannot please everyone with your defaults, no matter how hard you try.

atoav 5y ago
Afaik the way autoplay works is that if it is on, it does only autoplay videos without sound. This can be useful for looping video backgrounds, memes and such. If they want audio too, autoplay does not work (not even if you try to manually trigger it via js). In my eyes (browser-configurable) autoplay without sound is an acceptable use case. Autoplay with sound is not.
- TonyTrapp 5y ago
  I would have agreed with that until news sites started popping videos into view as soon as you start reading their news articles. Since that became a way too common thing, I don't care enough for the other valid uses cases anymore and right away disable any sort of autoplay. :(
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Yeah this is why we can't have nice things. And why I run two adblockers. If you give them a finger they'll take the hand
  - atoav 5y ago
    Yeah that is shit, but they could also pop blinking text in your face — should we now ban text for that reason?
    - 3np 5y ago
      The <blink> tag is now legacy for reasons.
- franga2000 5y ago
  Autoplay with sound is a perfectly legitimate use case, but I agree with the status quo that it should not be allowed by default. In general, the "not an acceptable use case" argument is almost always a harmful distraction - it angers people with legitimate use cases and that in turn gives fuel to those supporting it only for their own harmful use-cases. Call it what it is - a useful feature that happens to be commonly abused. s/autoplay/cookies/g, etc.
  - atoav 5y ago
    I thought about this a lot, but did not find a single case where I would like to have a website suddenly play audio without me specifically clicking "play" or "unmute" somewhere.
    - franga2000 5y ago
      - media sites like YouTube (some people prefer that when they click on a new video, it actually starts playing) - notification sounds - playlists of any sort (music or video) Most of this can be worked around by prompting the user on load and then never reloading the page (SPA fetch-and-replace pattern), but even big sites screw this up (like YouTube, where the memory usage increases with every "fake reload"). Again, I wouldn't want just any site to do this unexpectedly, but the ones where I want those features should be able to do it.

atoav 5y ago

Afaik the way autoplay works is that if it is on, it does only autoplay videos without sound. This can be useful for looping video backgrounds, memes and such. If they want audio too, autoplay does not work (not even if you try to manually trigger it via js). In my eyes (browser-configurable) autoplay without sound is an acceptable use case. Autoplay with sound is not.

TonyTrapp 5y ago
I would have agreed with that until news sites started popping videos into view as soon as you start reading their news articles. Since that became a way too common thing, I don't care enough for the other valid uses cases anymore and right away disable any sort of autoplay. :(
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Yeah this is why we can't have nice things. And why I run two adblockers. If you give them a finger they'll take the hand
- atoav 5y ago
  Yeah that is shit, but they could also pop blinking text in your face — should we now ban text for that reason?
  - 3np 5y ago
    The <blink> tag is now legacy for reasons.
franga2000 5y ago
Autoplay with sound is a perfectly legitimate use case, but I agree with the status quo that it should not be allowed by default. In general, the "not an acceptable use case" argument is almost always a harmful distraction - it angers people with legitimate use cases and that in turn gives fuel to those supporting it only for their own harmful use-cases. Call it what it is - a useful feature that happens to be commonly abused. s/autoplay/cookies/g, etc.
- atoav 5y ago
  I thought about this a lot, but did not find a single case where I would like to have a website suddenly play audio without me specifically clicking "play" or "unmute" somewhere.
  - franga2000 5y ago
    - media sites like YouTube (some people prefer that when they click on a new video, it actually starts playing) - notification sounds - playlists of any sort (music or video) Most of this can be worked around by prompting the user on load and then never reloading the page (SPA fetch-and-replace pattern), but even big sites screw this up (like YouTube, where the memory usage increases with every "fake reload"). Again, I wouldn't want just any site to do this unexpectedly, but the ones where I want those features should be able to do it.