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Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

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Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#51
post #26

Auto-playing crap bugs the hell out of me. Some news sites do it as well even when you go and Pause the player, it will go on and play ahead after a few seconds. Started using "Disable HTML5 Autoplay"[1] extension in Chrome and works great. I wish every browser would stop sound and video by default until i hit Play or have a setting for that. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-auto...

That's what you get when you don't clearly separate text content from multimedia. With HTML5 it's all mixed together.

And now you end up with text content full of annoying interactions, and crippled down multimedia functionality.

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#52
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autoplay music was in for a while, went out, then came back in, from what I recall: Back in the 1990s, it was MIDI files on the stereotypical Geocities page, or completely hand-made pages, and that went out in a massive design backlash against those kinds of sites. Now, it's coming back in the form of autoplay video on news sites, for example, which would have been impossible in the dial-up era. So this isn't a new t…

Yeah, I guess you're right. Seems like back in the day it wasn't nearly as pervasive, you'd know to expect a terrible MIDI track if you hit somebody's MySpace page but generally didn't need to worry about it elsewhere -- but maybe that's rose-colored nostalgia speaking. (I've never used the phrases "rose-colored nostalgia" and "MySpace" in such close proximity before)

MySpace can a bit later than what msla is referring to.. in fact, the MySpace period (mid 2000s) may have been the best in this regard, as the amateur site makers were increasingly people who didn't know HTML and used more restricted tools like Blogger, but the bandwidth for pervasive video wasn't around yet.

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#53
post #26

Auto-playing crap bugs the hell out of me. Some news sites do it as well even when you go and Pause the player, it will go on and play ahead after a few seconds. Started using "Disable HTML5 Autoplay"[1] extension in Chrome and works great. I wish every browser would stop sound and video by default until i hit Play or have a setting for that. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-auto...

I find the extension rather unreliable actually. There are a lot of sites (e.g. Twitter embeds) where turning off autoplay also seems to break manually clicking play as well (forcing me to temporarily disabled the extension and reload page).

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#54
post #5

> The content is muted, or does not include any audio (video only) Sigh. So no surprise audio but nothing to stop the trend of silent video ads or (even worse) muted live TV? How about NO auto playing live video or files over 250k? Don't waste my bandwidth streaming stuff I'm not trying to watch.

This would break using mp4s as "gifs" which is a pretty common practice these days. Taking away these features might cause people to go back to actual gifs which would be terrible... so I can understand why they want to leave this loophole open. I would like the idea of having a user configured limit for autoplaying gifs though...

To fix that problem, they could remove gif support at the same time.

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#56
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autoplay music was in for a while, went out, then came back in, from what I recall: Back in the 1990s, it was MIDI files on the stereotypical Geocities page, or completely hand-made pages, and that went out in a massive design backlash against those kinds of sites. Now, it's coming back in the form of autoplay video on news sites, for example, which would have been impossible in the dial-up era. So this isn't a new t…

>Annoying people have always been annoying. But it increases engagement!!! I'm happy to see these changes coming.

"Engagement" is one of those words, like "value-add", that mean someone is trying to fuck you over.

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#57

>Chrome will only autoplay a given piece of content when the media won’t play sound or the user has indicated an interest in the media. I wonder if a certain "Tube" site will have "indicated interest" on by default, hmm...

Probably. I can't imagine the point of going to a youtube page that is solely dedicated to a video and having no intention of watching or listening to it. I wouldn't be opposed to being required to click play though.

I wonder how this will affect YouTube playlists, though.

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#58
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autoplay music was in for a while, went out, then came back in, from what I recall: Back in the 1990s, it was MIDI files on the stereotypical Geocities page, or completely hand-made pages, and that went out in a massive design backlash against those kinds of sites. Now, it's coming back in the form of autoplay video on news sites, for example, which would have been impossible in the dial-up era. So this isn't a new t…

>Annoying people have always been annoying. But it increases engagement!!! I'm happy to see these changes coming.

Ad tech is indistinguishable from toddlers who haven't learned the difference between good attention and bad attention.

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#59
post #7

Autoplay seems to be something universally reviled and yet the trend seemed to be that enough people tolerated it to make advertisers and sites double down on it: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/19/facebook-... > During Facebook’s announcement of the feature in February, product manager Dana Sittler and engineering manager Alex Li said: “As people watch more video on phones, they’ve come to expect sou…

I've pretty much stopped going to CNN because of this. I have managed to block a lot of this video by using privacy badger and blocking the underlying CDNs where it is played from. However, I've never been able to block CNN effectively, so I've just given up on them.

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#60
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really want no auto playing of any multimedia. I wish browsers didn't support this functionality at all. The user should not ever be forced to do / go through something he does not expect to happen.

What about GIFs?

Let me choose whether to click on it. Or let that part of the gif format die altogether.
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