Chrome will begin pausing many Flash ads by default on September 1 • Hacker News Board

Re: Chrome will begin pausing many Flash ads by default on September 1

#121

Post by zamalek » Fri, Aug 28, 2015, 2:09 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #107

dredmorbius wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've gotten high mileage by blocking OVPs directly. I'm advocating doing this to encourage video providers to NOT enable autoplay on video. 0.0.0.0 www.autofixinfo.com # Autoplay video 0.0.0.0 c.brightcove.com # Autoplay video 0.0.0.0 player.theplatform.com # Autoplay video 0.0.0.0 link.theplatform.com # Autoplay video 0.0.0.0 ci-2862d2c8d6-68f418d2.http.atlas.cdn.yimg.com # Autoplay video 0.0.0.0 video-img2.thedaily…

Firefox provides the "media.autoplay.enabled" setting, which can be disabled. It's a very difficult setting to implement correctly, but it works most of the time. The larger trouble is that many websites, including YouTube, expect autoplay to work and act slightly wonky when it doesn't. Edit: Have some bug links Original reporter suggesting the setting should apply to HTML5 media. Includes a very long discussion of t…

Thank you!

> act slightly wonky when it doesn't.

I would hope so. Autoplay videos are fraught with discrimination: "live in a country where bandwidth is expensive? Fuck you, have an autoplay video."

I hope browsers move toward having autoplay as default "off" in the future.

Re: Chrome will begin pausing many Flash ads by default on September 1

#122

Post by userbinator » Fri, Aug 28, 2015, 2:16 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #37

dredmorbius wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've gotten high mileage by blocking OVPs directly. I'm advocating doing this to encourage video providers to NOT enable autoplay on video. 0.0.0.0 www.autofixinfo.com # Autoplay video 0.0.0.0 c.brightcove.com # Autoplay video 0.0.0.0 player.theplatform.com # Autoplay video 0.0.0.0 link.theplatform.com # Autoplay video 0.0.0.0 ci-2862d2c8d6-68f418d2.http.atlas.cdn.yimg.com # Autoplay video 0.0.0.0 video-img2.thedaily…

Yeah, but you can only do that in systems with access to DNS resolution. Tablets, mobile phones and computer systems as normal user, no such luck.

If you can configure the DNS servers directly or via DHCP in the network settings of the device, then you can take control of how domains get resolved at that level.

In fact I've (unintentionally) bypassed site-blocking on some public networks, just because I configure my devices to use public DNS servers instead of whatever the DHCP provides.

Re: Chrome will begin pausing many Flash ads by default on September 1

#123

Post by ceejayoz » Fri, Aug 28, 2015, 2:18 PM UTC

jscheel wrote: post #114

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only other regular 'tiny content' thing I can think of is ZeroClipboard (which puts an invisible flash movie over a button so you can click 'copy') as Javascript clipboard actions still aren't broadly supported [2]. ZeroClipboard is used by Github and lots of other sites for the little buttons next to repo URLs, etc. 1 - https://github.com/zeroclipboard/zeroclipboard 2 - http://caniuse.com/#search=clipboard

IIRC socket.io has a flash fallback.

No need for a fallback in Chrome, and it'd be exempted under the tiny transport plugins exemption too.

Re: Chrome will begin pausing many Flash ads by default on September 1

#124

Post by nmcfarl » Fri, Aug 28, 2015, 2:19 PM UTC

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #23

phamilton wrote: post #15

For anyone interested in the definition of "essential", see the source code: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/master/... (See constants) and https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/master/... (See ShouldThrottleContent) TLDR, essential content is either: 1) On the same domain as the page 2) Considered "Large" (at least 298 x 398, certain aspect ratio, minimum total area), with an exce…

The only other regular 'tiny content' thing I can think of is ZeroClipboard (which puts an invisible flash movie over a button so you can click 'copy') as Javascript clipboard actions still aren't broadly supported [2]. ZeroClipboard is used by Github and lots of other sites for the little buttons next to repo URLs, etc. 1 - https://github.com/zeroclipboard/zeroclipboard 2 - http://caniuse.com/#search=clipboard

Some file uploaders have a tiny flash backup today - and some of the ones from just a few years ago where little more than a button image with a flash backend.

http://caniuse.com/#feat=filereader

Re: Chrome will begin pausing many Flash ads by default on September 1

#125

Post by asquabventured » Fri, Aug 28, 2015, 2:21 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #48

jlgaddis wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>* I've gotten high mileage by blocking VPNs directly.* Uh... oh! You meant CDNs? I'd suspect there'd be a lot of collateral damage if you block entire CDNs, no?

As I discovered while looking for targets of opportunity, the term of art is apparently "online video provider", or OVP ( not "VPN" as I'd first written, thinking "video provider network". "Tips for Choosing an Online Video Platform (OVP)" http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Ar... Yes, there's collateral damage. I'll take it. If needs be, I'll hop into /etc/hosts and unblock for a moment.

Make yourself a script file called 'RenHosts.bat'[1] and place it somewhere convenient, I personally have mine pinned to the start menu. This allows you to "easily" turn your modified HOSTS file on/off.

You'll need to right click and run the script as Administrator since it is accessing your System32 folder.

[1]http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hostsfaq.htm#Rename

Re: Chrome will begin pausing many Flash ads by default on September 1

#126

Post by userbinator » Fri, Aug 28, 2015, 2:28 PM UTC

tyingq wrote: post #113

harigov wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of curiosity - could there be issues other than just performance here? For ex., could it be that Flash based ads can identify user/device contributing to privacy issues?

I'll suffer the downvotes, but going forward "Flash Ads" == non-Google provided ads. It doesn't hurt Google to hobble ads from competing networks.

The other ad networks likely won't be using Flash anymore either, which makes blocking ads more difficult - and that is a good thing to ad networks in general. Thus I won't say it's Google against others, and while it may seem so in the short term, in the long term Google and other ad networks benefit from it (while the users suffer...?)

Re: Chrome will begin pausing many Flash ads by default on September 1

#127

Post by arxpoetica » Fri, Aug 28, 2015, 2:32 PM UTC

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #23

phamilton wrote: post #15

For anyone interested in the definition of "essential", see the source code: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/master/... (See constants) and https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/master/... (See ShouldThrottleContent) TLDR, essential content is either: 1) On the same domain as the page 2) Considered "Large" (at least 298 x 398, certain aspect ratio, minimum total area), with an exce…

The only other regular 'tiny content' thing I can think of is ZeroClipboard (which puts an invisible flash movie over a button so you can click 'copy') as Javascript clipboard actions still aren't broadly supported [2]. ZeroClipboard is used by Github and lots of other sites for the little buttons next to repo URLs, etc. 1 - https://github.com/zeroclipboard/zeroclipboard 2 - http://caniuse.com/#search=clipboard

https://github.com/zeroclipboard/zeroclipboard/issues/606 Submitted an issue, just in case.

Re: Chrome will begin pausing many Flash ads by default on September 1

#128

Post by acdha » Fri, Aug 28, 2015, 2:40 PM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #120

archon810 wrote: post #6

The irony is that while they recommend converting ads to html5 (or auto convert them with swiffy), the performance goes to shit as well, arguably even worse than flash would have been, at least on mobile. - http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/25/google-now-automatically-c... - https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=467709 - https://plus.google.com/+ArtemRussakovskii/posts/MtcZGJprWje

arguably even worse than flash would have been I'm not surprised. As someone who has worked with it (and even written pieces of a simple Flash renderer), SWF was designed to be an extremely compact format and is far simpler to parse and render than the HTML + CSS + SVG + JS replacement that's being promoted. In that respect, all the complaints about Flash and mobile battery life should be attributable to the mere pre…

The part about the file format is quite true but it's not the only thing to compare since there are so many features in either runtime and Flash has been used for so many different things. The most relevant example here was the way Adobe made only half-hearted attempts to optimize video playback, which is where I saw the battery life discussion really get started as more people noticed that playing H.264 video back in Flash took an entire CPU core and still dropped frames while playing the same file in or the Windows/OS X media frameworks took less than 10% for perfect playback.

Re: Chrome will begin pausing many Flash ads by default on September 1

#129

Post by kin » Fri, Aug 28, 2015, 2:44 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #31

kin wrote: post #3

Good riddance. Sometimes I forget to turn ad-block back on after testing stuff. Thanks Google.

Tip: use different user profiles. A "stock", "raw", or "testing" profile for unfiltered use. Though better sandboxing would be my choice.

Wouldn't switching between different profiles be the same effort as enabling/disabling?

Re: Chrome will begin pausing many Flash ads by default on September 1

#130

Post by freehunter » Fri, Aug 28, 2015, 3:33 PM UTC

zamalek wrote: post #121

coldpie wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox provides the "media.autoplay.enabled" setting, which can be disabled. It's a very difficult setting to implement correctly, but it works most of the time. The larger trouble is that many websites, including YouTube, expect autoplay to work and act slightly wonky when it doesn't. Edit: Have some bug links Original reporter suggesting the setting should apply to HTML5 media. Includes a very long discussion of t…

Thank you! > act slightly wonky when it doesn't. I would hope so. Autoplay videos are fraught with discrimination: "live in a country where bandwidth is expensive? Fuck you, have an autoplay video." I hope browsers move toward having autoplay as default "off" in the future.

I visited a site that was linked here recently and they not only had an autoplaying video, there was no way to pause it or stop it. The only option was to mute the video, while it still played.

Horrible. That's why people use ad blockers.