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

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181–190 of 330 posts

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

#181
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…

The overlays. My god man. It's like every time these days. You're starting to read this link you clicked through to. It's interesting. And then the screen goes dark.

If you're lucky it loads fast and the x to close is somewhere visible. You're rarely lucky though.

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

#182
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…

The overlays. My god man. It's like every time these days. You're starting to read this link you clicked through to. It's interesting. And then the screen goes dark.

If you're lucky it loads fast and the x to close is somewhere visible. You're rarely lucky though.

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

#183
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…

The overlays. My god man. It's like every time these days. You're starting to read this link you clicked through to. It's interesting. And then the screen goes dark.

If you're lucky it loads fast and the x to close is somewhere visible. You're rarely lucky though.

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

#184

I am now a victim of the adage, "Be careful what you wish for because you might just get it". I hated Flash. I either avoided installing it or used a Flash blocker. So I always managed to avoid the auto-playing problem when the Internet primarily used Flash for everything annoying. Now that Flash is about dead and everything is HTML5 now, neither of these techniques work any more to avoid auto-playing.

I too long for the good old days, when web garbage was mostly confined to Flash and popups (and punch-the-monkey GIFs). Now it's all an HTML5 wasteland full of warring JavaScript. Good job, W3C!

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

#185
That's stupid. Many apps really need vidéo autoplay:

- YouTube - video usages (webrtc) - some apps for people with disabilities...

You may ask for an option of disabling it by default (which will make some apps not working) but not impose your choice and "insult" developers choices that have a far better pov than you. :/

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

#186
post #179

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…

You can also change your browser, or with some browsers, a setting option.

There is a disable autoplay in Firefox as a hidden pref. Enabling it break YouTube (offender number 1) and Vimeo.

Vimeo's take is that it is a bug in the browser hence it should be fixed. But then Vimeo are the same that told use to use Safari on Linux because Firefox "didn't support HTML5" (it did, just not encumbered H264 codec, but when you are lying, do the extra mile).

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

#187
post #17

There are a couple Chromium bugs filed about this: https://crbug.com/107923 and https://crbug.com/514102 Overriding autoplay can lead to a confusing user experience -- play/pause synchronization issue with embedded YouTube videos: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1217438 The Disable HTML5 Autoplay extension is often suggested for Chrome, and it has 112,213 users, but it's far from perfect: https://chrome.…

But then Chrome and Youtube come from the same company. Maybe they should coordinate.

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

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So the other day I met the guy who makes all that crap on-line I told him you can have my cash But first you know I've got to ask What made you want to live this kind of life? He said there ain't no rest for the wicked, money don't grow on trees I got bills to pay, I got mouths to feed; ain't nothing in this world for free I know I can't slow down I can't hold back though you know I wish I could Oh no there ain't no…

We never lost control

You're face to face

With the man who sold the world

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

#189
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…

It may not be annoying for you, but it is for others. Once I opened a link from a website, basically it's some ad, and what I got is a porn video playing aloud. What would have happened, if you're parents were beside you and it's a public place? You maybe from someother country, where people wouldn't mind way too much.

But if you are from India, then all balls would be on you, and that would be the most embarrassing moment in your life.

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

#190
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Formatting text this way makes it hard to read on mobile and in text browsers. I couldn't even reply just now, my text wouldn't show up as I typed it, I had to click "edit" so I could view and edit my post by itself. [edit] dang, can something be done about this? Flagging for format? Maybe a little drastic, but try reading HN in elinks, you'll see that a long line breaks the whole page. How about line wrap? Desktop u…

Wouldn't it be easier to just fix the CSS?

No, since the text used code semantics. A better solution would be to introduce a few more formatting options, such as attributed and unattributed quote blocks.
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