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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

#91

Post by mattigames »

userbinator wrote: post #39
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…

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.

I agree with you in principle but is more nuanced than that, lets say an user taps a link they think goes to a gif, according to you there should be a play button over the gif? You would be killing a lot of traffic for that site because that annoys users, or imagine a site with infinite scroll (ala twitter) with funny gifs, should the user have to click each single gif they want to watch? Plus keep in mind the users would save a lot of (maybe costly) bandwidth and battery if they used muted videos instead of GIFS so why use them?

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

#92

Post by swiley »

gruez wrote: post #62

tangentially related: what's everyone's solution for blocking autoplaying sticky videos? By that I mean the kind that usually shows up on news sites or tech blogs. It usually manifests as a "recommended" video that's totally unrelated to the article at hand, and stars playing without you clicking the play button. If you scroll past the video, many of them convert to a sticky mini player that stays around wherever you…

My solution is to remember what site it is and never ever visit them again because that’s totally unacceptable.

If for some reason you absolutely have to spend time on a broken site like that it’s pretty easy to delete the video (or dickbar or ad or whatever) with the web inspector.

In general links to anything other than eg lkml or lwn make me pretty uncomfortable tbf.

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

#93

Post by untog »

baybal2 wrote: post #58
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…

Man, who came with that idea? I really want to know the name of that product manager. It takes only one of those 4k video ads to kill my data package within seconds, with me not even having an idea of that happening. With amount of stuff you threw at adblock before, I can not keep assuming goodwill from your side. Your explanation about "giant gifs" is so disingenuous.

> It takes only one of those 4k video ads to kill my data package within seconds, with me not even having an idea of that happening.

Right, but the point is that disabling autoplay video doesn’t stop that from happening. An ad network would use a canvas tag or a GIF instead. That’a not disingenuous reasoning, it’s exactly what they do!

In your situation you need some kind of browser setting to limit download size, because that’s your problem. Not the method by which that huge amount of data is being presented on screen.

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

#94

Post by untog »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #89
ehsankia wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

So block autoplaying animated gifs and canvas animations?

In the canvas case it wouldn’t block the huge downloads, it would just stop them being visible.

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

#95

Post by missblit »

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…

That's an argument for disabling large GIF autoplay or tying it to the autoplay setting, not for removing the autoplay setting entirely!

Though I guess in the extreme case a webpage could have a huge grid of 1x1px divs that change color in a requestAnimationFrame callback based on data retrieved over XHR.

So I can kinda see their point of view. It still seems a bit too far in the other direction if you ask me though.

... But enough grumbling. I wanted to point out the following documents for more context:

https://blog.chromium.org/2017/09/unified-autoplay.html (Somewhat wordsmithed...)

https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/audio-video/auto...

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EH7qZatVnTXsBGvQc_53R97Z...

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

#96

Post by gruez »

beervirus wrote: post #85
gruez wrote: post #62

tangentially related: what's everyone's solution for blocking autoplaying sticky videos? By that I mean the kind that usually shows up on news sites or tech blogs. It usually manifests as a "recommended" video that's totally unrelated to the article at hand, and stars playing without you clicking the play button. If you scroll past the video, many of them convert to a sticky mini player that stays around wherever you…

Ad blocking.

That's the obvious solution but maintaining the list yourself is a hassle, and I don't know of any community maintained lists for this kind of thing.

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

#97

Post by paulryanrogers »

ehsankia wrote: post #73
amluto wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 we…

I'd like the option to abort downloading once a gif reaches the first full frame or 1MB. Whichever comes first. Looks like Chrome will never be that browser.

Seriously gif is only used because it's autoplay predates widespread abuse of autoplay generally. Now is the time to put an end to it, at least as an option.

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

#98

Post by JadeNB »

Razengan wrote: post #63
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.

> Then maybe the solution is to also have the option turn off animated GIFs Safari actually does that! At least on Big Sur, if you enable the "Reduce Motion" option in Accessibility Preferences, gifs only animate when you hover the pointer over them. Feels a bit odd at first (e.g. on animated Discord emojis) but then it seems like an option that should have been there since forever.

> Safari actually does that! At least on Big Sur, if you enable the "Reduce Motion" option in Accessibility Preferences, gifs only animate when you hover the pointer over them.

I'm not on Big Sur yet, so I can't check, but it's a shame if that's the only way to animate it, because I might trust OS-curated animations but not random-website-curated animations. It's a browser preference, not necessarily an OS-wide preference. (But I do think that inheriting it is sensible!)

As with all things customiseable, Firefox has had this option for a long time. (But look for their Chrome-chasing to lead them to get rid of this option soon ….)

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

#99

Post by joobus »

gruez wrote: post #96
beervirus wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ad blocking.

That's the obvious solution but maintaining the list yourself is a hassle, and I don't know of any community maintained lists for this kind of thing.

Firefox for android allows extensions, so you can use ublock origin.

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

#100

Post by shakna »

untog wrote: post #93
baybal2 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, who came with that idea? I really want to know the name of that product manager. It takes only one of those 4k video ads to kill my data package within seconds, with me not even having an idea of that happening. With amount of stuff you threw at adblock before, I can not keep assuming goodwill from your side. Your explanation about "giant gifs" is so disingenuous.

> It takes only one of those 4k video ads to kill my data package within seconds, with me not even having an idea of that happening. Right, but the point is that disabling autoplay video doesn’t stop that from happening. An ad network would use a canvas tag or a GIF instead. That’a not disingenuous reasoning, it’s exactly what they do! In your situation you need some kind of browser setting to limit download size, be…

> Right, but the point is that disabling autoplay video doesn’t stop that from happening. An ad network would use a canvas tag or a GIF instead. That’a not disingenuous reasoning, it’s exactly what they do!

Then deal with the canvas tag or GIF, like Firefox already has the capability to. Don't suddenly decide it isn't worth the effort.

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