The only problem is I want YouTube videos to do this when on that website.
I don't.
Have a tendency to pop open multiple vids, or have large session restores. Don't need to track down a dozen fucking autoplaying fucking videos.
Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
251–260 of 330 posts
Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
#252In my opinion it isn't the browser vendors who should decide what content gets displayed. On mobile, I browse with JavaScript disabled. Pages load fast and I don't get anything but HTML.
Second this!
I too have resorted to disabling Javascript as a solution to the annoying/user-unfriendly mobile web. Fortunately, most sites still fail with a fair degree of grace, i.e. making it possible to read the content of the page with JS disabled. The fact that most news sites load approximately 10x faster is a nice bonus as well.
On Android, there are plugins for Firefox and Chrome. The plugin I use for FF comes with a handy quick-setting in the address bar. Makes enabling JS again easier on the rare occasion where it is actually necessary.
Furthermore, disabling JS on my Kindle is the only way to make the experimental browser reasonable to use.
Oh, on a side note: if devs would please stop loading article text over JS, that would be great. Same goes for styling elements with JS without reverting to something reasonable if the browser has it disabled.
Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
"There are these developers who just made an awesome web app 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'."
Buying recognition is nothing new in tech.
"Our startup spent its entire marketing budget on PR: at a time when we were assembling our own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000 a month. And they were worth it."
Read this article, "The Submarine" ~ http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
#254Things 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.
In Firefox, mouse over the offending overlay, and right click to get "Inspect Element". Mouse around the DOM inspector window until you've reached the top element of the overlay. Right click on "Delete Node". No more overlay.
Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
My Watch Later is like 100 videos long. Ain't nobody got time for that.
youtube-dl can download lists of videos. It also automatically doesn't download things you already have, so it can be used periodically to sync the list if you want. It only really matters if you expect videos to go down, but I also have my small collection of "videos that were obviously going to be taken down".
This is one of the best features (apart from channel backups).
I think because of its name people also don't realize that youtube-dl works for LOTS of other sites and it's relatively easy to add new sites in as well.
Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
#256Ask this on their bug tracker.
Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
#257Yes please. In fact, let it be a preference if I even wish to buffer that stuff, rather than just not autoplay it. Because, being mostly on low-bandwidth, metered or very crappy connections, I almost certainly do not want several dozen MB of completely unwanted garbage shoved down my (metered) pipe.
Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
#258I can't way I want this default. I do find it annoying though when sites decide to put a very small 100x100 auto playing video at the bottom of the page. Cnet is one of the bigger offenders
Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
> > 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 visit. > This was also true of popups. It still is. Is this analogy really correct, in the sense that there are legitimate , user-focussed cases for pop-ups? I know lots of web-sites want me to see pop-ups, and som…
Not only is the analogy correct, the problem has the same solution: require evidence of user intent. Pop ups work just fine when spawned as a result of a user clicking on a link. Videos can start playing when a user taps or clicks on them.
> Not only is the analogy correct, the problem has the same solution: require evidence of user intent.
You make a very good point, but I'm not totally sure that it is the complete answer. I agree that it is clearly right for my browser to display pop-ups, and play videos, when I indicate my intent that it do so. My question was not whether that should happen, but whether any users want pop-ups as the method of interaction (or information display). Although I definitely want, in an operational sense, PeopleSoft to show me a pop-up when I click on the relevant button, because that's the only way to get to certain information, what I really want, in an aspirational sense, is for it to display the information in some other way, without a pop-up at all.
Re: Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Auto-Playing Media in Browsers
#260Actually iOS didn't have auto play until recently. Back then the outcry from developers was the opposite - "y won't you implement the standard!"
Restrictions were lifted in iOS10 less than four months ago: https://webkit.org/blog/6784/new-video-policies-for-ios/