Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

venturebeat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 188 posts

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#101

Post by Ajedi32 »

ehsankia wrote: post #70
dguaraglia wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latest craziness is "news" websites that have an autoplay video + an autoplay ad, and their actual content is just another video, because apparently reading 10 lines of text is harder than sitting through a two minute slideshow with the same ten lines of text and some pretty pictures. It's getting ridiculous.

I don't think it's a simple problem though. I want my videos on Youtube, Twitch and other similar sites to auto play, without having to click it manually every single time. We get into a whitelist/blacklist situation. The best way is to stick to one way, and allow users to fully unblock a site. Right now, it auto plays but you can fully blacklist a whole domain. I could also see it as everything is blocked and you wh…

> everything is blocked and you whitelist Youtube. Maybe even automatically does it if you click play on a few videos

That's basically what they're doing: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJ...

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#102

Post by jessriedel »

Klathmon wrote: post #87
jessriedel wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, it seems like site-specific permission settings are the way on this. The "Do you want to share your location with this website?" check seems to work fairly well. I think "Do you want to allow videos with sound to autoplay?" would too.

You have to be very careful with that though. Already it seems that 75%+ of news sites ask me to show notifications, and the alerts alone asking for it are getting annoying. I'd be even more upset if every site now had to ask for permission to do all kinds of things (Do you want to allow sound? Do you want to allow cookies? Do you want to allow video?) I don't know the answer on how to deal with this stuff, but I don…

I agree. One way to ameliorate this problem is to only allow sites to even ask for permission to autoplay content with sound if the user has manually played a video a few times in the past.

More generally, you can set permission settings to be very conservative by default and not allow sites to bother the user with permissions until the user has interacted positively with the site several times in the past. Here, "positively" could be a fairly fuzzy rule of thumb depending on the global trustworthiness of the site and the sensitivity of the permissions requested.

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#103

Post by lima »

k3oni wrote: 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...

Yay, let's install another extension with full access to all your stuff!

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#104

Post by Dylan16807 »

katastic wrote: post #100
Klathmon wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to be very careful with that though. Already it seems that 75%+ of news sites ask me to show notifications, and the alerts alone asking for it are getting annoying. I'd be even more upset if every site now had to ask for permission to do all kinds of things (Do you want to allow sound? Do you want to allow cookies? Do you want to allow video?) I don't know the answer on how to deal with this stuff, but I don…

The answer seems pretty obvious. Make notifications and autoplaying vidoes OPT-IN. A site requests the feature, and a little icon pops up on the far right of the URL bar. The user has to know to click that button to allow notifications, or auto-playing, or other exploitable features like Javascript message popups. Now, if they want people to use those features, they simply have to write a message on their website tel…

For the average user, hiding the UI that much is a terrible and confusing experience.

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#105

Post by makecheck »

This must be fixed long-term by segregating browser capabilities into tiers that are clearly visible to the user, and severely limiting defaults on data size, compute time, etc. especially when your site claims to belong in the "simple web site" tier. In other words, unless the user thinks it makes sense for you to download lots of data and do complex things, you can't.

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#106

Post by Dylan16807 »

icebraining wrote: post #47
giancarlostoro wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I said, it's fine if it's expected.... If it's the ONLY video in the whole page, and it's the main set of content.

Right, but how would the browser tell which is the main set of content?

Doesn't the flash code have metrics based on size? Size and closeness to the top seems pretty good.

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#107

Post by cookiecaper »

k3oni wrote: 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...

The problem is that HTML 5 video is really useful for replacing animated image formats. The technology in modern video codecs is way superior than gifs, etc., and the real impact of that is greatly reduced space/bandwidth consumption, like orders of magnitude better.

Just as we start to leave gif in the dust, Facebook pulls the dick move of auto-enabling sound on all auto-played HTML 5 content.

I think that Google's solution of refusing to autoplay videos with soundtracks is a good compromise which will allow us to continue to enjoy the benefits of modern video codecs while simultaneously preventing built-in video support from gaining the bad rap that got attached to Flash.

---

EDIT: Reply to rhizome, since I'm not allowed to post for a while for having an illegal opinion on Kubernetes.

I'm not suggesting that the technology would be eliminated in its entirety, but disabling autoplay of all HTML 5 video neuters its use as a replacement for animated gifs.

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#109

Post by Klathmon »

jessriedel wrote: post #102
Klathmon wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to be very careful with that though. Already it seems that 75%+ of news sites ask me to show notifications, and the alerts alone asking for it are getting annoying. I'd be even more upset if every site now had to ask for permission to do all kinds of things (Do you want to allow sound? Do you want to allow cookies? Do you want to allow video?) I don't know the answer on how to deal with this stuff, but I don…

I agree. One way to ameliorate this problem is to only allow sites to even ask for permission to autoplay content with sound if the user has manually played a video a few times in the past. More generally, you can set permission settings to be very conservative by default and not allow sites to bother the user with permissions until the user has interacted positively with the site several times in the past. Here, "po…

That is a bad idea from my point of view.

Whatever the solution is, it should be consistent and easily knowable by the average user.

How would a website tell a user to enable auto-playing video for a website that they want it for (for example, how would youtube tell users to enable that)? How would the user even understand that this website won't work correctly for them but it works fine for their friends/family/other-browsers?

I've made a web-app that uses camera access, and the web audio API. Without either of them, the app is 100% useless, so locking those behind a permission that won't even show up until the user has been there for a while completely kills that app.

While I understand you are only talking about auto-playing video, the point still stands IMO. Trying to "guess" what the user wants is wrong when it comes to enabling/disabling features.

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#110

Post by Dylan16807 »

ravenstine wrote: post #68
danso wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The design document talks about applying a heuristic to determine which sites are expected by users to play video: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJ... > The Media Engagement Index (MEI) aims to provide a metric reflecting the engagement of a given user with regards to media playback on a given origin. The intent of this metric is to allow websites scoring high enough to be able to bypass t…

Ugh, that sounds dreadful. Doesn't this prevent anyone besides YouTube and a handful of other sites from establishing themselves as video hosting sites? Besides that, adding another hard-to-predict layer to the web is just... bleh. We shouldn't need heuristics to make the web a nice place to be. Boycotts on website should start becoming a regular thing. I simply don't return to websites that pull shenanigans like aut…

It kicks in once the user visits a site 5 times. Nothing that really favors big sites.

I have no idea what to do about the hundreds of gotchas around html/css/javascript.

Post reply on HN