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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

#71

Post by brainfog »

EE84M3i wrote: post #43
javieranton wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mis…

Pinging a bug five minutes after filing it is also an ...interesting... approach.

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

#72

Post by ncr100 »

dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #61

A lot of comments here trying to explain this away but let me point out that Apple disabled autoplaying unmuted videos in moble Safari years ago (it's not even behind a setting as far as I know) and I can't imagine them backing off of that any time soon. On the contrary, Apple will savage decades old APIs just to marginally improve privacy [0]. Which is what Google would do if users were the customer. Apple is proble…

Can we get safari on android? (Rhetorical question.)

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

#73

Post by ehsankia »

amluto wrote: post #60
userbinator wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then maybe the solution is to also have the option turn off animated GIFs and perhaps frequent canvas repaints too; and not simply give up completely ! In any case, just leaving the option alone so at least it has some effect like it did before, would still be better than essentially a full surrender.

How about restricting the frame rate of all elements until some heuristic determines that the user has interacted with them?

Restricting framerate will still download the 100mb GIF.

Also, so many parts of websites use gifs and canvas. If you start blocking those, you'll be hiding loading spinners, menus and more. You're adding ton and ton of complexity and going at war after something pretty silly.

If a website is abusive and does shitty things, just don't use the website. After some point, it's no longer the browsers job to babysit the web. I completely agreed with autoplaying audio, but blocking video is just not worth it.

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

#74

Post by AmericanChopper »

fiblye wrote: post #66
userbinator wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then maybe the solution is to also have the option turn off animated GIFs and perhaps frequent canvas repaints too; and not simply give up completely ! In any case, just leaving the option alone so at least it has some effect like it did before, would still be better than essentially a full surrender.

This is the common sense solution. And what sites are replacing videos with massive gifs? Buzzfeed-like sites have always been filling their pages with 250 megabytes of gifs. News sites with half a dozen autoplaying videos certainly won't be replacing their videos with multi-gigabyte gif versions. And it seems like detecting a large, constantly repainted canvas would be easy enough.

I remember implementing some web proxy monitoring a while ago, and I had a whole list of sites I had to ignore because of stuff like this. HN homepage would take a handful of milliseconds to load, but some sites would routinely take 10-20 second to get to the window load. Somebody asked “but what if a user complains that cnn.com is loading too slowly?”, and we all agreed we’d just have to tell them to get in touch with CNN.

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

#75

Post by smegger001 »

londons_explore wrote: post #21
sg47 wrote: 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...

there are several dozen countries with lower populations that that.

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

#76

Post by ehsankia »

dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #61

A lot of comments here trying to explain this away but let me point out that Apple disabled autoplaying unmuted videos in moble Safari years ago (it's not even behind a setting as far as I know) and I can't imagine them backing off of that any time soon. On the contrary, Apple will savage decades old APIs just to marginally improve privacy [0]. Which is what Google would do if users were the customer. Apple is proble…

> autoplaying unmuted videos

autoplaying unmuted videos have been disabled on almost every browser, on desktop and on mobile, for years. This isn't unique to Safari and Apple.

This is specifically about autoplaying muted videos, which gifs and canvas can replace.

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

#77

Post by ehsankia »

barkerja wrote: post #24
toyg wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Works for Apple.

Not sure what you're referring to, but Safari has three configurable options for auto-play: - Allow All Auto-Play - Stop Media with Sound - Never Auto-Play This can be configured on a global level, or on a site-by-site basis.

Does it handle blocking autoplaying gifs and canvas? If not, it's not really solving the problem then.

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

#78

Post by dang »

Razengan wrote: post #57
barkerja wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you're referring to, but Safari has three configurable options for auto-play: - Allow All Auto-Play - Stop Media with Sound - Never Auto-Play This can be configured on a global level, or on a site-by-site basis.

Wow, the above comment was already grayed out in just 5 minutes, simply for stating some facts, as are all the other comments on this page which are critical of Google. Sometimes it seems HN is heavily astroturfed by Google; They will bury any criticism and somehow bizarrely manage to turn it against other companies! Any company that does such blatant manipulation just makes people despise them further.

Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#79

Post by ehsankia »

userbinator wrote: post #32
chromeengineer3 wrote: post #13

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…

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.

How so? It's not only that it doesn't work, but that it is actively making the web worse.

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

#80

Post by the_pwner224 »

throwaway189262 wrote: post #64
spankalee wrote: post #31

(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…

Publishers found gaping holes in their blocking and response is to give up. Firefox already has config options to disable image animations and canvas. I've had them on for ages and sites work fine. Maybe they can re-enable popup windows too since sites replaced them with interstitials long ago. Chrome's dominance needs to end, this is blatantly anti user. Google could have de-ranked sites with hostile behavior a deca…

> Google could have de-ranked sites with hostile behavior a decade ago and we wouldn't be dealing with any of this stuff.

They already block what they consider to be 'bad' ads on websites. This is just them giving up because there's no strategic value in making a user-focused browser.

chrome://settings/content/ads

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