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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

#201
post #198
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…

Disclaimer: I work for Google 1. I was annoyed at killing reader too. However, in hindsight before we had Google reader and that was it. Now there is Feedly, Feedbin and multiple self hosted aggregators. And a plethora of RSS clients. RSS did not “die” because of lack of tech around it but because majority prefers twitter and Facebook. Had Reader stayed, would people be lamenting its dominant position?

Not if it stayed a user-friendly tool. Which it probably wouldn't.

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

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a website is abusive and does shitty things, just don't use the website. What do you do if the aforementioned is not done by the website as such, but by some omnipresent, and hard to avoid 3rd party ad net? > 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. Video is by far the heaviest piece of media out the…

> What do you do if the aforementioned is not done by the website as such, but by some omnipresent, and hard to avoid 3rd party ad net? Use an ad blocker. Since mobile chrome doesn't allow adblocking, this means you will have to choose one of the many other mobile browsers that do.

This is not a duty of adblocker. You don't have it to be an ad to bust your data package.

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

#203
post #163

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.

Techies don't like to think about it, but it's obvious. The only reason why Chrome has come to dominate the market is because Google leveraged their monopoly in search. And even beyond Google Search, if you used Google Mail or anything else by Google, they'd repeatedly put notifications telling you that Chrome is great and why don't you download it? Then there's using all those billions of dollars to pay everybody to…

Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows and made it impossible for users to remove it. That's not at all "pretty much the same thing."

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

#204
Not really. Just disable JS and you are good as gold. Even though JS is not technically required, find a website that doesn't load almost all media assets using JS. And when you occasionally need to use JS, just share the webpage with another browser like Edge that has JS enabled. Guru level mobile browsing.

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

#205
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't turn off gifs or canvas because it would just break too much internet. I could imagine and equal reaction thread here if google deemed some gifs and canvas uses "unworthy" and were blockable.

> You can't turn off gifs or canvas because it would just break too much internet. That sounds like a challenge. I think if there were a click to play button on gifs > N megabytes or > X*Y resolution, nobody would complain, nor would they complain about click to play on frequently updated canvases.

I suggest using uBlock Origin https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...

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

#206
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BigG couldn't do that (disable other user hostile media) because it would interfere with ads. Now I'm looking for a gif and canvas blocker for FF mobile. Any hints on how to tune uBO?

You can't turn off gifs or canvas because it would just break too much internet. I could imagine and equal reaction thread here if google deemed some gifs and canvas uses "unworthy" and were blockable.

Turning off canvas only breaks tracking. Very few sites require it to work. Firefox will ask you to enable it on a per-site bases by enabling privacy.resistFingerprinting.

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

#207
post #198
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…

Disclaimer: I work for Google 1. I was annoyed at killing reader too. However, in hindsight before we had Google reader and that was it. Now there is Feedly, Feedbin and multiple self hosted aggregators. And a plethora of RSS clients. RSS did not “die” because of lack of tech around it but because majority prefers twitter and Facebook. Had Reader stayed, would people be lamenting its dominant position?

As your a google employee, whats the reason of google suddenly implementing YouTube "Sign in to continue" popups when I try to use YouTube?

I have cookies disabled however, with that, it means I then get the popup every single time I play the video.

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

#209
As much as I find Firefox less than user friendly at times (by comparison), it is worlds better when it comes to blocking unwanted items and putting the user first (For example Multi-account containers).

I really wish that Chrome wasn't so dominant. Google has all it's incentives in the wrong place, and therefore can't be trusted to fight for the user.

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

#210
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…

Use UBlockOrigin, and every time you see one of those sticky thumb players, create a regex rule to remove it. I must have hundreds of those little rules in place on my browsers. I never searched how to send my list to one of the maintainers of the most popular ad/annoyance lists but I think now it's time.

I was doing that but it became frustrating, so I blocked all 3rd party JS and then whitelisted as I went around the web.

My filter list is here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aembleton/Arthurs-Annoyanc...

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