Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 330 posts

Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers

#41

Post by onion2k »

This is eating up our data and inconveniencing millions of people using your products.

The data issue can be addressed by only having videos play automatically when the user is on a wifi connection. This is the default for mobile devices already, so it's arguably already solved for most users.

The "convenience" issue is something that I strongly suspect is actually something that people think one way but act another - lots of users claim to hate auto-playing videos but then they watch them a lot. Facebook's video engagement statistics are hard to argue with - a well designed video that works without sound (eg something from Buzzfeed) gets a tremendous number of shares, likes and click through engagements.

I strongly suspect that turning off auto-playing video, even by default, would actually make the web worse for the majority of people. For those who prefer them not to autoplay, browser vendors do provide that, but the functionality is usually buried in the equivalent of chrome://flags somewhere.

Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers

#42

Post by kevincox »

tfgg wrote: post #37

Things that make me just close tabs straight away: 1) Autoplaying videos, especially ads. 2) Pop-ups / overlays. 3) Loading lots of extra elements causing text to jump around. Especially true if I'm just browsing around and click on something that looks interesting, the above will take that thing from "this might be worth 30 seconds" to "not worth it". Why kill that little dopamine boost someone just got from clickin…

I'm the same way. If there is an overlay or autoplaying video I just leave. However apparently most people aren't like us otherwise no sites would do it.

And you can see that these sites get posted to HN, so at least someone is reading it. Personally though I prefer more pleasant sites.

Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers

#43

Post by the8472 »

kijin wrote: post #38
glandium wrote: post #24

My "favorite" case is a site that sometimes embeds videos, and also has autoplaying videos for advertising. You can't listen to anything from the former because of the latter. Even worse, when you pause the advertising video, it autorestarts after a while. So if the embedded video is long enough, you just can't watch it entirely. So, in fact, while e.g. Firefox has a mute button for each tab, I also wish it had an in…

You can actually mute or pause individual videos by right-clicking on them and using the context menu. Many videos override the context menu, though, and it won't help with ads that automatically restart themselves. An option to disable an object altogether would be more useful. A more drastic solution that I sometimes resort to is to nuke the offending part of the page (often an entire sidebar) using the built-in de…

> Many videos override the context menu, though

Which in turn can be overriden by shift-rightclick

Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers

#44

Post by frankzinger »

onion2k wrote: post #41

This is eating up our data and inconveniencing millions of people using your products. The data issue can be addressed by only having videos play automatically when the user is on a wifi connection. This is the default for mobile devices already, so it's arguably already solved for most users. The "convenience" issue is something that I strongly suspect is actually something that people think one way but act another…

    The data issue can be addressed by only having videos   
    play automatically when the user is on a wifi 
    connection. This is the default for mobile devices 
    already, so it's arguably already solved for most users.
Not all WiFi connections equate to an infinite amount of data. Due to circumstances I am on a connection for which I pay per GB and it's shared through a WiFi router. I do not want my browser to download videos unless I asked it to.

Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers

#45

Post by Belenus »

There are some sites that display not ads but fake virus alerts. When I visited one of these sites, I got a message blaring out of my computer to call a phone number or to reinstall my computer to get rid of a "virus." (Hopefully it was not.) Every time I closed out of the message box a new one would appear, and I finally managed to close out of the site. It's happened a few times. This may not entirely relate to the topic you were speaking about. :)

Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers

#46

Post by Tepix »

onion2k wrote: post #41

This is eating up our data and inconveniencing millions of people using your products. The data issue can be addressed by only having videos play automatically when the user is on a wifi connection. This is the default for mobile devices already, so it's arguably already solved for most users. The "convenience" issue is something that I strongly suspect is actually something that people think one way but act another…

It's still an issue if you use a mobile wifi hotspot to go online and have limited bandwidth (like most of Japan for example).

Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers

#48

Post by kevincox »

pjc50 wrote: post #31
petre wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did that buy youtube is still on autoplay.

Y'know, youtube is one of the few sites where people actually want autoplay to work.

Yeah, if I know I'm going to a YT link I'm prepared for it. Unfortunately with the rise of URL shorteners I often don't know I'm going to a video site so I'm still undecided about whether I want the video to autoplay or not.

Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers

#49

Post by unclebucknasty »

tfgg wrote: post #37

Things that make me just close tabs straight away: 1) Autoplaying videos, especially ads. 2) Pop-ups / overlays. 3) Loading lots of extra elements causing text to jump around. Especially true if I'm just browsing around and click on something that looks interesting, the above will take that thing from "this might be worth 30 seconds" to "not worth it". Why kill that little dopamine boost someone just got from clickin…

Never understood how autoplaying video, especially ads, became an acceptable UX for so many sites. And, it seems that the advent of ad blockers has made this worse. Like, some sites are abusing people as much possible to offset revenue losses.

I was also surprised at how difficult it is to get a modern browser to consistently disable the feature.

Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers

#50

Post by Tepix »

hashtagMERKY wrote: post #11

I really dislike auto-playing audio and video as well, for all the reasons you mentioned, but also for a less logical reason: it just makes it feel like the browser isn't on your side. If a site is automatically playing audio or a video advert, its design is not in the user's interest, so in that situation your software has to choose whose side to take. I just want and expect the software I have installed on my compu…

What makes you think the browser is on your side? You are getting it for free, therefore you are paying in some other way.

Look at Mozilla. They claim to be the champion of your rights, yet they enable 3rd party cookies by default and hide the setting to change it. That's just pathetic. They should stop their masquerade and just admit that they are Google's puppet (they are providing the money to keep Mozilla alive) and NOT serving the user's interest.

Post reply on HN