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

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

#101

Post by sotojuan »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #52
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…

Your know there are HN readers who write this crap. I wonder if they'll chime in on why they do.

Because their PM/CEO tells them to do and it's their job? Most developers have little say in this.

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

#102

Post by lucaspiller »

thomasdd wrote: post #89

There are situations when you need to play video on load. (for example, you want a nicely designed content or DIVs.) But Maybe a browser option to enable/disable video playback would solve this. Maybe disabling audio would be as an option, so as webdesigner you can show the relevant visual content but without sound.

> There are situations when you need to play video on load

No there really aren't, not on page load [0]. Show a nice still with a big play button on it - people know what that means. It's probably going to load faster too, so people won't be stuck staring at a blank section for 15 seconds. Or even worse, start reading and scrolling the first two paragraphs, then wonder why some audio started playing.

And as others have said, you may be costing the user money - there is no way to tell if they have to pay for their data usage, so be kind and minimise how much data you need.

[0] I may be able to excuse you if you are building a streaming video service, and want the next episode to play automatically.

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

#103

Post by bradleyankrom »

massysett wrote: post #6

This behavior is so bad that I have changed my browsing behavior. I visit only selected, trusted news sites, as "free" sites are horrible offenders here. Google is much less useful while on desktops as it is likely to return obnoxious websites. So far I have not had a bad autoplay problem on iOS. However a growing problem is obnoxious pop up ads that are difficult to escape. Overall more of my Internet usage is shift…

> One reaction of theirs has been to pack more information directly into their search result.

Really good point -- I have noticed that a lot recently. It's expanded beyond the right side bar, which was already pretty useful (if only a Wikipedia summary). Many times I get what I was looking for by simply searching Google, rather than taking the additional step of clicking into one of the results. This is good for me but bad for someone, I'm sure.

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

#104

Post by hello_there »

FullMtlAlcoholc wrote: post #10

Here is a chrome extension that mutes audio for all tabs except thw selected one: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/smart-tab-mute/dnf...

This is an improvement, but I don't think that sound is always welcome in the selected tab either. With a few exceptions (like YouTube) I'd like sound to be off by default.

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

#105

Post by bradleyankrom »

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…

Not to mention that it's often difficult to find where exactly the auto-playing ad is located on the page. It's like a treasure hunt, but with clandestine advertisements and instead of treasure, your reward is a little piece of your soul dying.

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

#106

Post by gravypod »

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…

Wifi connection does not mean a good ISP is backing it. I'd hate to be some poor guy in Australia and end up using some of my precious bandwidth.

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

#107

Post by qbrass »

clarry wrote: post #60
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #55

This - so much this. A common scenario in my house: The spouse or I muttering obscenities over the autoplay ads, along with a comment of, "Use your powers for good , dammit! For good!" I find these intrusive. So much so that I occasionally browse with the computer muted - especially if the source of entertaining sound is coming from the spouse's computer or if I'm looking at cooking sites. Most times, I'm just wantin…

Give all your monies to the advertisers. Maybe, just maybe they will stop bothering you once you have no more money to buy whatever crap they are advertising?

They'll just advertise ways to earn more money.

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

#108

Post by ynak »

the8472 wrote: post #12

firefox -> about:config -> media.autoplay.enabled = false additionally the dom.audiochannel.mutedByDefault and media.default_volume settings may also be useful if you want slightly different behavior. If you want a more blunt tool you can also use content blockers to block media content until you opt into it for a particular site. > I know there are plugins than can somewhat do this, but no solutions are universal or…

I'm taking a more drastic way; turning media.{mp4, webm, ...}.enabled into False never let YouTube and other media autoplay(even play nomally) without any addons. When I want to watch videos, download them by youtube-dl and watch locally.

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

#109

Post by bunderbunder »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #49
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.

When it's ads served over an ad network, the site honestly doesn't have a lot of control over what content goes in the ad boxes. Advertisers don't really care, either - it's not their user experience they're garbaging up.

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

#110

Post by the8472 »

svckr wrote: post #82
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…

Re 2): Pinterest. It's the cancer of Google image search. I don't get how Google's search ranking doesn't massively penalize that behaviour. I'd rather stomach an advertisement than the "plz register" BS.

Yeah, isn't it against google's policy to present different content to bots and to fleshy users?
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