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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

#111

Post by teamhappy »

j_s wrote: post #31

Devil's advocate / counterpoint: https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/908675882587484160 My complaint here is that Google is making things worse for media/game pages by making life good for people reading web content proper

That would have been a reasonable response to Apple's announcement. From what I can tell they will disable all autoplaying media in the upcoming version of Safari, including muted video.

The only thing Google won't let you do anymore is autoplay audio. I think most people agree that that's one of the things you should never ever do anyway. If you need audio, add a play button to your game/creative coding thing.

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#112

Post by lorenzhs »

andrewfong wrote: post #53
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...

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).

For Twitter, you can disable video autoplay in the account settings and whitelist twitter.com in the extension. But there are other sites where this doesn't work.

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#113

Post by JoshTriplett »

exodust wrote: post #94
camus2 wrote: post #12

I'm not sure why all these websites decided that auto-playing video is a good thing. It's annoying as hell. I click on an article for reading, I'm not clicking on a youtube playlist. The latest craze among web designers being videos that follow the reader even when they are scrolling down the page! Enough! Can we have a designer here explaining why they do this? If it's about engagement, i'm not going back to your we…

If the video follows you down the page in a paused state, with thumbnail and "play" icon, would this be okay? The video that follows you down the page is trying to help you, not annoy you. It gives you the chance to read the article while having the vision there too. It's only a problem if the video autoplays, which unfortunately is all of the time on all sites that do this.

> If the video follows you down the page in a paused state, with thumbnail and "play" icon, would this be okay?

Absolutely not. If the video is useful content, put it front and center, and let the user hit "play" on it; if they scroll it away, accept that they don't want it. If it's unrelated content (as with the thousands of "news" sites that want to autoplay an unrelated "hey look at this completely unrelated garbage" video), put it under a "related stories" column or similar, and stop making it jump around the page to draw attention. The user is already on the page they wanted, their attention is exactly where they want it to be, and your job is to serve them what they want, not what you want.

"Engagement" might be easy to measure (hey look, if we pester the hell out of users we get a few more users who accidentally watched the video), but the much better metric for long-term sustainability is "how many users love your site and think 'this is awesome'".

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#114

Post by maxxxxx »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #104
katastic wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How about showing the content paused with an overlay "Click to start playing" or similar?

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#115

Post by Pxtl »

chickenfries wrote: post #29
MBCook wrote: 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...

Could easily use different infrastructure for giflike-mp4 vs streamed video. Different tags, even.

Handle the "giflike" case as a file that must be hosted in full with audio forced off. Non-giflike case allows streaming.

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#116

Post by jessriedel »

Klathmon wrote: post #109
jessriedel wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/othe…

Your concerns are definitely valid, but note that every time the Chrome team chooses a browser default, or doesn't include a permission setting for every possible ability, they are guessing what the user wants. And these guesses will not be the same made by other browsers, so the user may still be confused why something works for their friends but not them. "Smart permissions" seem strictly better to me than allowing autoplay ads or no autoplay youtube, and reducing user frustration may just require ad-hoc tricks, e.g., filling the bank spot of a non-auto-played video with a permission dialog box. Likewise, using global trustworthiness information about a website could greatly improve guesses.

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#118

Post by dylan-m »

exodust wrote: post #94
camus2 wrote: post #12

I'm not sure why all these websites decided that auto-playing video is a good thing. It's annoying as hell. I click on an article for reading, I'm not clicking on a youtube playlist. The latest craze among web designers being videos that follow the reader even when they are scrolling down the page! Enough! Can we have a designer here explaining why they do this? If it's about engagement, i'm not going back to your we…

If the video follows you down the page in a paused state, with thumbnail and "play" icon, would this be okay? The video that follows you down the page is trying to help you, not annoy you. It gives you the chance to read the article while having the vision there too. It's only a problem if the video autoplays, which unfortunately is all of the time on all sites that do this.

> It gives you the chance to read the article while having the vision there too.

That is not a thing that an actual human is capable of doing. A human has two eyes which must be fixed in the same general direction, and one brain. As convenient as it would be for some interface designers, humans are not octopuses. The cocktail party effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect) is a useful thing to keep in mind when considering the limits of peoples' awareness. It happens for a reason.

You may think you can read an article and watch a video at the same time, but the fact is, no, you cannot. One of the two things is making it very hard to focus on the other.

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#119

Post by sosborn »

koonsolo wrote: post #49
j_s wrote: post #31

Devil's advocate / counterpoint: https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/908675882587484160 My complaint here is that Google is making things worse for media/game pages by making life good for people reading web content proper

And this one: "What's interesting here is how what this really demonstrates is that Flash really was exactly what we wanted". With HTML5, who didn't see annoying JavaScript popups and autoplay videos coming? Seriously. If you think about the web, think about 2 things: 1. Text content 2. Multimedia content People complaining about Flash always used arguments for nr 1. For me, I want my text content to be really static…

Annoying stuff is always annoying, but the major complaints about flash were centered on security holes and excessive CPU utilization.

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#120

Post by rhizome »

cookiecaper wrote: post #107
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…

Nobody's talking about eliminating HTML5 video as a technology.
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