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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

#131
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want that?

One good reason for me personally is to insure future availability. As I type this, there are a couple of videos in my watch-later playlist that have been replaced with "video removed".

My Watch Later is like 100 videos long. Ain't nobody got time for that.

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

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So use an adblocker to give them lesson.

Yep, that's what I tend to do. Particularly on my mobile device, where I've settled into a scorched earth policy on ads.

Sucks, though. I like having access to high-quality content, and I believe journalists deserve to get paid for their work. Unfortunately, the Internet at large has long since decided that just paying people for their product over the table is not what the norm should be.

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

#133
post #125
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You download YT videos before watching them? Seriously? Sometimes the suggestions on HN are literally insane in the amount of effort people go through to avoid things that wouldn't be a problem in the first place if you did something simple like use adblock software. I saw some other post where a guy hand edits tens of thousands of entries in his hosts file... yeah dude what an amazing use of time.

Link to the guy who does this?

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

#134
post #115

What you are really asking is for Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS to make a better web _for you_. Because you don't want media to autoplay does not mean it is a good solution to just block it outright for everyone. Some websites have legitimate use for autoplaying media. Some users (believe it or not) actually _like_ their videos autoplaying when they scroll through their Facebook feed or whatever media site they visi…

This was also true of popups. It still is. Yet it became such a scourge from people misusing it that browsers interested in providing their users the best experience provided an option to disable them (where we are now with auto-play) and eventually turned on that option by default. Pop-up blocking became a feature users would switch browsers for, forcing all vendors to add it. If advertisers continue to use auto-play and ridiculously large animated gifs the way they've been going, I suspect it's only a matter of time before this potentially useful feature also defaults to off.

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

#135

CNN 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.

I stopped using si.com (CNN's sports site) because of the incredible user hostile actions on that site - as you say not only autoplaying but intentionally coding around users expressed desires to stop autoplay.

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

#137
It is not as simple as that. Even if videos are prevented from being auto-playing, people resort to much much worse techniques. For example, GIFs - which are much bigger that the corresponding video, worse for battery life etc. To combat this, Chrome recently enabled autoplaying of videos if the video is muted on mobile browser. Hopefully this gets the number of people using GIFs down.

Or who knows, people might start animating images on canvas or something. Allowing auto play in some conditions seems to be lesser of two evils according to me..

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

#138
post #125
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You download YT videos before watching them? Seriously? Sometimes the suggestions on HN are literally insane in the amount of effort people go through to avoid things that wouldn't be a problem in the first place if you did something simple like use adblock software. I saw some other post where a guy hand edits tens of thousands of entries in his hosts file... yeah dude what an amazing use of time.

I've used to employ a similar work flow to GP until a few years ago when video support finally got acceptable in web browsers. I still download talks rather than watch them on youtube or if I want to insure the future availability of the video.

If the current web works well for you then great, but it would be naive to think that it fits everyone's use case (Even more so to label what they need to do as "insane").

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

#139
Another problem that Facebook has (and I'm sure others have as well) is attempting to fetch dozens and dozens of videos. At once. This generally locks up even desktop browsers as they try to preload the content. I've seen it trying to grab 130 videos before. Pretty ridiculous.

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

#140
I wrote a small extension for personal use that can set various preferences on a site-by-site basis. One of the main things I wanted to be able to do is disabled autoplay. However, I found that a lot of sites just start the video from js instead of setting the 'autoplay' attribute. I was able to put in some stronger defense by using MutationObserver to stop a video that was played without the user clicking play, but then I found that some sites have code that will force a video to be playing, so even a manual pause would be overridden, and the site's js would contend with my extension's js.

There's no way to stop autoplay if we allow free, programmatic access to videos (without blocking js too, which I use noscript for).

I had the same problem with the 'loop' attribute. I wanted videos to not loop. I found that some sites loop videos without using the 'loop' attribute. I would disable 'loop' on the , but the would be replaced by a new autoplaying when the original video ended.

This is about the point that I gave up on my extension.

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