Auto-playing crap bugs the hell out of me. Some news sites do it as well even when you go and Pause the player, it will go on and play ahead after a few seconds.
Started using "Disable HTML5 Autoplay"[1] extension in Chrome and works great.
I wish every browser would stop sound and video by default until i hit Play or have a setting for that.
This would break using mp4s as "gifs" which is a pretty common practice these days. Taking away these features might cause people to go back to actual gifs which would be terrible... so I can understand why they want to leave this loophole open.
I would like the idea of having a user configured limit for autoplaying gifs though...
I really want no auto playing of any multimedia. I wish browsers didn't support this functionality at all. The user should not ever be forced to do / go through something he does not expect to happen.
As I recall they tried that, but the problem was that some ads would use a canvas to emulate video.
I have disabled js global in Chrome, but had to enable it for a lot of sites. That is pretty simple for me, but most people are not computer programmers; still if you have the technical chops, I recommend it.
I'm probably missing something here, but the document says that media autoplay is allowed if visitors keep visiting the site and interacting with the video player:
> The MEI score will be computed as is:
> If number_of_visits < 5:
> Return 0
> Else
> Return number_significant_playback / number_of_visits
Yea, it seems like site-specific permission settings are the way on this. The "Do you want to share your location with this website?" check seems to work fairly well. I think "Do you want to allow videos with sound to autoplay?" would too.
> During Facebook’s announcement of the feature in February, product manager Dana Sittler and engineering manager Alex Li said: “As people watch more video on phones, they’ve come to expect sound when the volume on their device is turned on.”
> *"After testing sound on in News Feed and hearing positive feedback, we’re slowly bringing it to more people.”
Likely Chrome's feature won't affect FB given how much FB is on mobile but I'm interested in how media sites, such as CNN, will be impacted. Seems like they've become dependent on throwing up an annoying newscast video (with post-roll ads) for every article. Many times unrelated.
Facebook's motivation is not that users of the site want it. It's that when they autoplay it they get to lie to advertisers and claim that "users engaged with the video content for x seconds," and charge them accordingly.
Every person I see using Facebook scrolls past the vast majority of videos in their feed as fast as they can because they don't want it to start playing. And then when they do find one they want to play, it's this race to pause the video and rewind it to the beginning as they make it full screen and start it over so they can see the whole thing. Then at the end, they have to stop the auto-scrolling to the next one so they can go back and see the funny part they liked, or whatever. It's so ridiculous.
the trend seemed to be that enough people tolerated it to make advertisers and sites double down on it
I don't think that's what they're saying.
“As people watch more video on phones, they’ve come to expect sound when the volume on their device is turned on.”
Sure, when you watch a video you expect sound. That has nothing to do with autoplay, or expectations about websites in general. They're only answering the question they wished was asked, and consequently, people get played when they have the same interpretation as you did.
I've pretty much stopped going to CNN because of this. I have managed to block a lot of this video by using privacy badger and blocking the underlying CDNs where it is played from. However, I've never been able to block CNN effectively, so I've just given up on them.
It's a start. Allowing users to disable autoplay altogether would be better, but shutting down the audio is better than nothing.
It's a shame that browsers increasingly have to actively defend against website behavior, instead of just being tools for displaying those websites; but, well, here we are.
> It's a shame that browsers increasingly have to actively defend against website behavior,
You make this sound like a new trend but it was always thus.
Didn't you live through the 90s before pop-up blockers were built in to browsers? Not to mentionvarious abusive plugins, attempts to trick you into installing toolbars, the hell that was RealPlayer, rewriting your history to prevent 'back', etc etc.
Autoplay music was in for a while, went out, then came back in, from what I recall: Back in the 1990s, it was MIDI files on the stereotypical Geocities page, or completely hand-made pages, and that went out in a massive design backlash against those kinds of sites.
Now, it's coming back in the form of autoplay video on news sites, for example, which would have been impossible in the dial-up era.
So this isn't a new thing, it's an old one that's come back. Annoying people have always been annoying.
It's allowed by default, but I imagine you can change that in settings as with all other permissions. That way you could have a whitelist of sites that are allowed to play audio.
It appears that there is already a feature in Chrome for Android which allows this. It will be removed around the same time as this patch to make things more 'consistent'
>Removing the block autoplay setting that is currently available on Chrome for Android
Look at this headline, "Chrome Will Soon Block Autoplay Videos With Sound—Here's Why You Should Be Worried" [1] What a brazen attempt at fear-mongering so they can protect their ability to be more ad-intrusive than porn websites.
Meanwhile the autoplaying video ad with sound on that page has no pause/stop/mute controls. Exactly why "Pushing advertisers to create a better browsing experience seems like it’s good for everyone" will never work unless browsers draw some lines
I'm not sure why all these websites decided that auto-playing video is a good thing. It's annoying as hell. I click on an article for reading, I'm not clicking on a youtube playlist.
The latest craze among web designers being videos that follow the reader even when they are scrolling down the page! Enough!
Can we have a designer here explaining why they do this? If it's about engagement, i'm not going back to your website if you do that to me once.
That would have been a reasonable response to Apple's announcement. From what I can tell they will disable all autoplaying media in the upcoming version of Safari, including muted video.
The only thing Google won't let you do anymore is autoplay audio. I think most people agree that that's one of the things you should never ever do anyway. If you need audio, add a play button to your game/creative coding thing.
And this one: "What's interesting here is how what this really demonstrates is that Flash really was exactly what we wanted".
With HTML5, who didn't see annoying JavaScript popups and autoplay videos coming? Seriously.
If you think about the web, think about 2 things:
1. Text content
2. Multimedia content
People complaining about Flash always used arguments for nr 1.
For me, I want my text content to be really static text content, and my multimedia content to be boxed-in multimedia. HTML4 and Flash were good at that. Now you have a mix of both:
1. Text content with annoying interactions
2. Crippled multimedia content (think about the terrible way iOS handles audio for HTML5 games. Expect this in all browsers soon).
I mean, "worse" here is really a relative term when it's so easy to re-enable for a page. I can't say i'm empathetic when i mostly see stupid autoplayed news clips and car ads.
It's a war for attention, and ultimately, money. If sites can't autoplay video with sound, they'll switch to more of the junk videos that make it onto Facebook (muted by default, I believe), which include giant captions or other distracting elements.
As much as I like this idea, I'm sure that this will also cause problems in certain cases.
Therefore, I'd like to see per-website "capability settings", just like you can allow smartphone-apps to access your microphone, camera, et cetera. And an API for websites to determine which capabilities they have, and an API to request the browser to ask the user to add a capability.
What about YouTube? I'm sure they'll add an exception for it, but it technically does classify as automatically playing a video when you click on a link.
This must be fixed long-term by segregating browser capabilities into tiers that are clearly visible to the user, and severely limiting defaults on data size, compute time, etc. especially when your site claims to belong in the "simple web site" tier. In other words, unless the user thinks it makes sense for you to download lots of data and do complex things, you can't.
Yay! Thank goodness. I've got 3 different extensions trying to achieve that to some extent (Stop HTML5 Autoplay, Flashcontrol and uBlock for some elements the others miss). They still miss some bad stuff and block some good. I just wish they'd make it easy to block all video apart from things where you actually click the play button.
Chrome's "own ad blocker" mentioned in the article sounds good in theory, but seems like a slippery slope to eventually making it simply show only Google's own ads.
Exactly! This isn't something that could happen, this is something that absolutely WILL happen. And when it does, Google will have won yet another battle against the decentralized web.
I think this is a good thing but I'm curious why the same reasoning isn't used towards preventing ads and trackers. They're both unwanted unless the user expresses an interest and as a bonus they also degrade performance or consume power and data on mobile devices.
I want something like uBlock running in Chrome on Android. I can do it in CopperheadOS or with Firefox, but it blows my mind that Google recognizes these types of issues but won't deal with perhaps the most egregious one.
All the stipulations here basically just mean it's a decision with no legs. If you don't want autoplaying audio, just install one of the many browser extensions that prevent this, e.g. "Disable HTML5 Autoplay". Alternatively, uBlock Origin and uBlock Origin Extra go a very long way to cleaning up my experience just by blocking any ads. It really only seems Bloomberg has gone out of their way to worsen the experience for UBO users, but that's not news you can't get somewhere else. The IBTimes is another with autoplay audio/video which is hard to completely kill, even with the extension armed. But again, that's not news you can't get somewhere else usually.
Probably. I can't imagine the point of going to a youtube page that is solely dedicated to a video and having no intention of watching or listening to it.
I wouldn't be opposed to being required to click play though.
Safari has had this for a while in the public beta of High Sierra and also has turned off plugins by default for eons... now how about following its lead on that cookie thing advertisers love to do to track... oh wait.
[+] [-] k3oni|8 years ago|reply
Started using "Disable HTML5 Autoplay"[1] extension in Chrome and works great. I wish every browser would stop sound and video by default until i hit Play or have a setting for that.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-auto...
[+] [-] MBCook|8 years ago|reply
Sigh. So no surprise audio but nothing to stop the trend of silent video ads or (even worse) muted live TV?
How about NO auto playing live video or files over 250k? Don't waste my bandwidth streaming stuff I'm not trying to watch.
[+] [-] chickenfries|8 years ago|reply
I would like the idea of having a user configured limit for autoplaying gifs though...
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomjen3|8 years ago|reply
I have disabled js global in Chrome, but had to enable it for a lot of sites. That is pretty simple for me, but most people are not computer programmers; still if you have the technical chops, I recommend it.
[+] [-] Someone|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CM30|8 years ago|reply
> The MEI score will be computed as is: > If number_of_visits < 5: > Return 0 > Else > Return number_significant_playback / number_of_visits
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJ...
Doesn't that mean some of the worst sites affected by this might still manage to get videos and sound files autoplaying?
Because if you go to a news site, it's quite likely you may end up watching a video about the story.
But at the same time... you don't want the background ads to automatically play, nor do you want said video playing by default on return visits.
Yet this system seems like it may allow the latter two things to happen.
[+] [-] jessriedel|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|8 years ago|reply
> During Facebook’s announcement of the feature in February, product manager Dana Sittler and engineering manager Alex Li said: “As people watch more video on phones, they’ve come to expect sound when the volume on their device is turned on.”
> *"After testing sound on in News Feed and hearing positive feedback, we’re slowly bringing it to more people.”
Likely Chrome's feature won't affect FB given how much FB is on mobile but I'm interested in how media sites, such as CNN, will be impacted. Seems like they've become dependent on throwing up an annoying newscast video (with post-roll ads) for every article. Many times unrelated.
[+] [-] nhtaoe78th2|8 years ago|reply
Every person I see using Facebook scrolls past the vast majority of videos in their feed as fast as they can because they don't want it to start playing. And then when they do find one they want to play, it's this race to pause the video and rewind it to the beginning as they make it full screen and start it over so they can see the whole thing. Then at the end, they have to stop the auto-scrolling to the next one so they can go back and see the funny part they liked, or whatever. It's so ridiculous.
[+] [-] rhizome|8 years ago|reply
I don't think that's what they're saying.
“As people watch more video on phones, they’ve come to expect sound when the volume on their device is turned on.”
Sure, when you watch a video you expect sound. That has nothing to do with autoplay, or expectations about websites in general. They're only answering the question they wished was asked, and consequently, people get played when they have the same interpretation as you did.
[+] [-] drewg123|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] outsidetheparty|8 years ago|reply
It's a shame that browsers increasingly have to actively defend against website behavior, instead of just being tools for displaying those websites; but, well, here we are.
[+] [-] andybak|8 years ago|reply
You make this sound like a new trend but it was always thus.
Didn't you live through the 90s before pop-up blockers were built in to browsers? Not to mentionvarious abusive plugins, attempts to trick you into installing toolbars, the hell that was RealPlayer, rewriting your history to prevent 'back', etc etc.
[+] [-] msla|8 years ago|reply
Now, it's coming back in the form of autoplay video on news sites, for example, which would have been impossible in the dial-up era.
So this isn't a new thing, it's an old one that's come back. Annoying people have always been annoying.
[+] [-] Ajedi32|8 years ago|reply
It's allowed by default, but I imagine you can change that in settings as with all other permissions. That way you could have a whitelist of sites that are allowed to play audio.
[+] [-] aclelland|8 years ago|reply
>Removing the block autoplay setting that is currently available on Chrome for Android
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] KyleBerezin|8 years ago|reply
[1] http://gizmodo.com/chrome-will-soon-block-autoplay-videos-wi...
[+] [-] conductr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] camus2|8 years ago|reply
The latest craze among web designers being videos that follow the reader even when they are scrolling down the page! Enough!
Can we have a designer here explaining why they do this? If it's about engagement, i'm not going back to your website if you do that to me once.
[+] [-] j_s|8 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/908675882587484160
My complaint here is that Google is making things worse for media/game pages by making life good for people reading web content proper
[+] [-] CJefferson|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teamhappy|8 years ago|reply
The only thing Google won't let you do anymore is autoplay audio. I think most people agree that that's one of the things you should never ever do anyway. If you need audio, add a play button to your game/creative coding thing.
[+] [-] koonsolo|8 years ago|reply
With HTML5, who didn't see annoying JavaScript popups and autoplay videos coming? Seriously.
If you think about the web, think about 2 things: 1. Text content 2. Multimedia content
People complaining about Flash always used arguments for nr 1.
For me, I want my text content to be really static text content, and my multimedia content to be boxed-in multimedia. HTML4 and Flash were good at that. Now you have a mix of both: 1. Text content with annoying interactions 2. Crippled multimedia content (think about the terrible way iOS handles audio for HTML5 games. Expect this in all browsers soon).
[+] [-] fish_fan|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stablemap|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javajocky|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilamont|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|8 years ago|reply
Therefore, I'd like to see per-website "capability settings", just like you can allow smartphone-apps to access your microphone, camera, et cetera. And an API for websites to determine which capabilities they have, and an API to request the browser to ask the user to add a capability.
[+] [-] Ajedi32|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] polygot|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makecheck|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tim333|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mizzao|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] franga2000|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] just2n|8 years ago|reply
I want something like uBlock running in Chrome on Android. I can do it in CopperheadOS or with Firefox, but it blows my mind that Google recognizes these types of issues but won't deal with perhaps the most egregious one.
[+] [-] fapjacks|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sir_Cmpwn|8 years ago|reply
I wonder if a certain "Tube" site will have "indicated interest" on by default, hmm...
[+] [-] izzydata|8 years ago|reply
I wouldn't be opposed to being required to click play though.
[+] [-] Ajedi32|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WoodenChair|8 years ago|reply