Agree this is an annoyance - how would you propose keeping features like YouTube or Netflix autoplay/playlists in this scenario?
Have a setting with allow and deny lists.
Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
71–80 of 330 posts
Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
#72I 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)…
Unless I've misunderstood something, I don't think Mozilla has received much if any money from Google for a couple of years now. They have search deals with Yahoo, Yandex, and Baidu in their respective markets, which would make me nervous about the future if I worked for Mozilla. Not sure whether those deals might lead them to make decisions against the users' interests.
Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
#73Things 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…
Your know there are HN readers who write this crap. I wonder if they'll chime in on why they do.
While I can't speak from first hand experience, I have an open ear sometimes.
There are these developers who just made an awesome webapp or something. It's really great but there is a problem. Noone knows about it. But they have a solution for that problem. They buy some "promotion". It's articles in newsletters or outright spam directed at their target audience. I cannot tell you exactly who their target audience is but I can tell you who it is not. It's not you, me or most readers on hackernews. It's less tech savyy people with more decision power. Old people. Their site is made for old people. And they don't care about you and me or any other passer-by who won't pay a dime. They care about conversion rates and that is what they monitor all day long.
It's a bit like in those scam-emails. They are so obvious that anybody with half a brain will click delete. But those who do reply, oh boy, they are so ready to be milked off by that nigerian prince.
Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
#74CNN especially gets on my nerves. They seem to have gone out of their way to do everything they can to make sure all plugins/extensions that try to block it fail.
CNET too. Makes me close the page immediately.
Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
#75Can't agree more.
Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Y'know, youtube is one of the few sites where people actually want autoplay to work.
When you visit a video explicitly, yes. But when you jump into a specific channel you don't want a default video auto-playing all the time, which is pretty annoying.
Blame Youtube for that horrible feature, not the browser.
Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
#77Another suggestion - enable pausing on video. ANY video. Keep seeing more and more advertising videos that don't even give you the ability to pause. In the past 12 months or so, I am really finding my web browsing experience hitting new shitty lows. Pretty hard to see the content you want these days behind that clutter of Outbrain ads, pop up newsletter subs, auto playing videos and the like...
This is actually quite difficult because even though they are using the browsers video pipeline the browser doesn't know anything about the UI of the page so it is very hard to expose a way for the user to pause/disable any video across all sites. I guess a hotkey that puts buttons on all videos might be good but I'm sure some sites would find ways to layer fake videos that would defeat this. It all comes back to the…
You don't need a pause button on all the videos. You just need a single button that pauses all the videos. I would be delighted if the escape key on my laptop served this purpose.
Of course, now you have no UI no restart a particular video. But the advertisers would figure this out about 30s after a global pause feature was introduced.
Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
#78Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
#79How can they stop it without breaking lots of things? Javascript has the ability to play sounds and videos without going through the standard video player. If you disable it, wouldn't it break various web apps and games?
Why? You can make the javascript believe that it's playing, but not actually output anything. Just like when I am setting my computer on mute and turn off the screen---but in the browser instead.
Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
#80I wrote https://github.com/ludios/mute-new-tabs and I am now happier with a quiet Chrome. The idea is to mute all new tabs and unmute them only when you interact with an in-page volume control (or manually unmute via the tab icon/context menu). This solves only the sound problem though, not the data consumption.
Awesome, thanks! Any chance you are putting it on the official extension store?