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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

#321

Post by TheGrumpyBrit »

Ruphin wrote: 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…

There are definitely legitimate use cases for autoplaying media. Youtube would be annoying if you had to click play on every page.

I think Facebook's implementation strikes just the right balance. The video autoplays when it's in view, but without audio. If you want audio, you can click the play button to view it properly.

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

#322

Post by AIMunchkin »

IvanK_net wrote: post #207

I completely disagree with this proposal. All websites should be allowed to play sounds any time they want to. Without it, webapps can not reasonably compete the native apps. I am a developer of web games and being able to play the sound from the beginning, without any interaction from the user, is one of the most essential parts of the game experience. If you visit a website which unexpectedly plays a sound, you sho…

If they like your game, they'll turn it back on.

And it's nice to espouse principles like yours, really, it's nice, but the spammers don't care about your principles and they're making everything suck. Perhaps Google should only do this for sites they haven't validated as a good net citizen?

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

#323

Post by Symbiote »

foobarchu wrote: post #308
sangnoir wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Looking at Google Analytics for a website we were about to launch, I was surprised to see hits from others in the development team, tracked by Google So you are OK with making Google track your users but you don't want to be tracked yourself?

More likely than not, their employer is ok with making google track their users. I doubt it's the decision of this particular developer.

Indeed, it's not my decision.

I'd like to use something we host, then we probably wouldn't need to have the EU cookie warning.

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

#324

Post by duaneb »

beambot wrote: post #280
duaneb wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> firefox -> about:config -> media.autoplay.enabled = false Unfortunately, this isn't available for devices with a monopolized browser. (iOS)

So make another Ask HN post: "Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Monopolized Browsers for our devices"

That wouldn't contribute anything to the conversation.

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

#325

Post by vurpo »

beambot wrote: post #280
duaneb wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> firefox -> about:config -> media.autoplay.enabled = false Unfortunately, this isn't available for devices with a monopolized browser. (iOS)

So make another Ask HN post: "Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Monopolized Browsers for our devices"

It would be more like "Dear Apple: Please End Monopolized Browsers for our devices"

Google's and MS's operating systems don't monopolize the browser. I'm not sure if Mozilla is even making an OS anymore. The only OS in this day and age which doesn't let you implement your own browser engine is iOS.

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

#326

Post by vurpo »

hub_ wrote: post #187
fjarlq wrote: 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.

How could they? They can't just disable autoplay but make an exception for YouTube, that would be wrong in so many ways. You can't make that into a web standard, so it would promote browser fragmentation, for example.

So how about a whitelist/blacklist? Well, since users can't even agree among themselves on which websites belong on which side of the fence, such a list would quickly become a nightmare to maintain, still be based on someone's personal bias, and would still leave small websites at a disadvantage.

Pretty much the only thing that would work is a permissions question to the user, like there is currently for e.g. location access. "Do you want to allow videosite.example.com to automatically play video content? \Allow, \Allow and remember, \*Deny"

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

#327

Post by kalden_ »

morganvachon wrote: post #159
Exuma wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Watching later with youtube-dl is actually the recommended way to do YouTube on OpenBSD; various "OpenBSD as a desktop OS" tutorials mention it, and in practice it works very well. On that particular OS it is due to the lack of a native Flash plugin, but even with YouTube offering most of their videos via HTML5 it actually makes for a better experience to download and then view them. I'd imagine it could even be auto…

> actually makes for a better experience to download and then view them.

Can you specify how? I was doing this when I didn't have enough RAM for the Youtube player with latest Firefox and it's not what I personally felt. The current player has size options (larger or full-screen), annotations and comments can be disabled (e.g. with Adblock lists). In the end it's always having the video canvas in front of your eyes. Maybe integration with a tiling WM?

> I'd imagine it could even be automated trivially, by calling youtube-dl via a browser plugin, or by writing a script to pass YouTube URLs to with a simple GUI thrown together in FLTK or TCL/TK.

Existing means for VLC integration aren't that bad either.

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

#328

Post by ergot »

nextos wrote: post #304
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…

Regarding 1 media.autoplay.enabled=false does the trick in Firefox about:config.

Or just disable mp4, webm, flash altogether in about:config. I typically view media in specially sanctioned browsers, just for viewing rich media.

E.G Chrome on windows 10 hooked up to a 4K Acer monitor via HDMI

You can harden FF also and remove a few other annoyances like the default PDF reader, etc:

https://github.com/pyllyukko/user.js/

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

#329

Post by morganvachon »

kalden_ wrote: post #327
morganvachon wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watching later with youtube-dl is actually the recommended way to do YouTube on OpenBSD; various "OpenBSD as a desktop OS" tutorials mention it, and in practice it works very well. On that particular OS it is due to the lack of a native Flash plugin, but even with YouTube offering most of their videos via HTML5 it actually makes for a better experience to download and then view them. I'd imagine it could even be auto…

> actually makes for a better experience to download and then view them. Can you specify how? I was doing this when I didn't have enough RAM for the Youtube player with latest Firefox and it's not what I personally felt. The current player has size options (larger or full-screen), annotations and comments can be disabled (e.g. with Adblock lists). In the end it's always having the video canvas in front of your eyes.…

> Can you specify how?

For me it was because Firefox on OpenBSD, even on a modern, fast system (quad core AMD64 with 8GB RAM), is so slow and stuttery with any streaming video it was too painful. Using youtube-dl and playing it via mplayer worked much better, and you can customize mplayer's controls to mimic YouTube's if you like (though I never bothered).

VLC is another great option, it's designed for streaming so yes that would be a great alternative. I personally don't use VLC on non-Windows OSes except on Haiku.

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

#330

Post by _andromeda_ »

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.

For the 'please register' overlays, you need an 'extension' called Kill sticky. It removes all html elements that are styled with 'position: fixed'

Here's the link: https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/

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