171–180 of 248 posts
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There are over 2 billion MAU on Google Maps...so for Google, yes its only... It wasn't sustainable
Most normal companies are okay with small divisions. Sometimes they'll sell them off. It feels like Google is like Intel. They reflexively kill anything that isn't going to be worth a few hundred million in revenue.
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…
This is weird. They see the general tech community slowly turning against them and they double down on all the wrong things they were doing that caused the negativity.
It's pretty difficult to change your momentum, product at google has decided on a direction and it will take a lot change that.
I don't get why Firefox's market share is still so low when compared to Chrome's. I get why FF fell behind over the last decade, but since Firefox Quantum those reasons have largely disappeared.
They wrote a (lisp/js) interpreter and then wrote the (editor/browser) in that language. Unfortunately using a much more weakly-typed language [to write what is almost an OS of its own] yielded a mass of unmaintainable, constantly-mutating bloatware. They claim to be rewriting the interpreter layer in Rust, which is awesome, but 99% of the browser will still be written in javascript.
Plus, when I abandoned Firefox for good (about a year ago) pinch-to-zoom STILL DID NOT WORK. This was in 2019. Seriously.
And they pay people to fiddle with VRML/WebVR instead of fixing all this.
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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 dream of a search engine that heavily penalizes websites with advertisements on it.
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…
Compile your browser without support for video codecs.
99% of the time I don't care if no videos play back in my browser.
0.9% of the time the video is on youtube, so I can youtube-dl it to watch with mpv, which kicks the crap out of every in-browser video playback UI ever created.
The remaining 0.1% of the time I fire up a separate browser that does have video codecs.
Web video is simply unnecessary. Try life without it, you won't mind.
(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…
Clearly Google was listening to the hoards of users who were incessant in asking that auto-play be mandatory without exception. (I know, sarcasm is lowest form of humor)
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It would be nice if the browser knew how big the gifs were before it downloaded them, and thus didn't download anything over a certain size.
Isn't the size in the header? (Which yea, could be faked, or sent as Chunked) the USER-agent could just make a cap, and stop after 1mb when image/gif media type
The Chrome Team really needs to be broken away from Google.
Who is going to pay them?