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Google has removed the option to disable autoplay from Mobile Chrome

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Re: Google has removed the option to disable autoplay from Mobile Chrome

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I notice your comment just a second after I posted this comment that suggests a reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24403934 ...and it turns out I was right! "It doesn't work all the time, let's remove it." Frankly, I really really hate that attitude.

Well... not so much "it doesn't work all the time", but "publishers are reacting to the existence of this option by using grossly inefficient alternatives which we can't block".

Then let them...!

At least the option would have some effect, now it has none. That is clearly a worse situation than before.

Fuck this idiotic slow boiling of the users.

Re: Google has removed the option to disable autoplay from Mobile Chrome

#42

(disclaimer: I work at Google, not on Chrome) The rationale here seems to be that by blocking video autoplay, Chrome incentivized sites shipping huge animated GIFs, or decoding video in JS and painting to canvas, both of which are very suboptimal for users. Another comment points to this issue: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=106364... quote: Unfortunately, full autoplay blocking is counter prod…

Huh, if it were my software I'd add the option of allowing 100MB GIFs or only on demand, and whether the browser should automatically stream blobs for the canvas or not...

There are ways to bypass it. You can always stream 1MB of data from 100 different domains.

Re: Google has removed the option to disable autoplay from Mobile Chrome

#43

I was curious about the rationale for this, so I did a quick search on chrome's issue tracker [1]. According to https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=106364... , it was removed because it didn't actually stop sites from autoplaying video: > full autoplay blocking is counter productive as images and can do "video" playback just fine. We had this issue on mobile and ended up enabling muted autoplay ther…

Sry for harassing here. If someone could look at the recent Android Webview v85 bug that has broken my app, that would be great. I raised a bug today for it https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=112552...

>Sry for harassing here. If someone could look at the recent Android Webview v85 bug that has broken my app, that would be great. I raised a bug today for it https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=112552...

Asking on HN for a random chrome engineer using a fresh throwaway (created for this specific post) to look at your 11 hour old low priority performance bug for a specific piece of hardware seems misguided. There are hundreds of engineers working on Chrome -- it is extremely unlikely this person is the right SME for this bug, and even if they were, how could they possibly do anything to your bug internally without revealing their identity?

Re: Google has removed the option to disable autoplay from Mobile Chrome

#44
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, if it were my software I'd add the option of allowing 100MB GIFs or only on demand, and whether the browser should automatically stream blobs for the canvas or not...

There are ways to bypass it. You can always stream 1MB of data from 100 different domains.

Regardless, the solution is not to (explicitly, i.e. removing the option was a conscious effort) give up.

Re: Google has removed the option to disable autoplay from Mobile Chrome

#45

(disclaimer: I work at Google, not on Chrome) The rationale here seems to be that by blocking video autoplay, Chrome incentivized sites shipping huge animated GIFs, or decoding video in JS and painting to canvas, both of which are very suboptimal for users. Another comment points to this issue: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=106364... quote: Unfortunately, full autoplay blocking is counter prod…

That's what happens when you let anybody and their friends run arbitrary code on the user's CPU. Javascript running by default was the original sin, and now there's no going back. IMO it ought to have been opt-in for the websites that really need it (i.e. web apps I actually want to use, not any random page I happen to stumble upon).

There's especially no going back for Google for whom it's very much a feature since they try to reimplement and replace the OS from within the browser.

Re: Google has removed the option to disable autoplay from Mobile Chrome

#48
post #29

If you're looking to switch and Firefox isn't your cup of tea, you'd probably like Kiwi -- it's based on Chromium and it has an integrated ad-blocker. https://kiwibrowser.com

Why it's not mentioned anywhere on website that it's open source?

https://github.com/kiwibrowser/src

PS: Oops, another guy posted the link earler.

Re: Google has removed the option to disable autoplay from Mobile Chrome

#50
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. A list of Google's decisions that drive me crazy. 1. Killing Google Reader 2. Removing swipe from Google News feed (both Chrome homepage and News feed in Android that's part of the launcher) 3. Deprecating Google Play Music and switching to Youtube Music (the interface is horrible and intended for videos). I'm a paying user of Google Play Music and this is idiotic. 4. Random recommendations in Youtube, especi…

Google reader only had 2 million users. They just happen to be the 2 million most vocal people in tech circles...

'only'
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