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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

#231

Post by userbinator »

dredmorbius wrote: post #186
madeofpalk wrote: post #112

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.

Another organisation's guiding principles suggest an alternate viewpoint: Individuals must have the ability to shape the internet and their own experiences on it. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

Mozilla's slogan used to say "putting users in control", which was then silently(?) replaced with "individuals":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040344

It's a very convenient phrasing, because these "individuals" certainly are doing what they say; it's just that they are not you. I trust Mozilla only slightly more than Google.

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

#232

Post by ksk »

Termious wrote: post #182
kelnos wrote: 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…

They also paid Dell to make it the default, but I suppose that's more ethical than tricking people to install it by bundling it with Adobe Flash or whatever other junk.

But to be super fair to Google, it certainly was an excellent browser initially, far far better than the competition - in terms of simplicity, performance, ease of use etc. Now its just a data collection/spying apparatus for Google, and I can't ethically use it anymore. I finally managed to convince our IT to switch everyone over to Firefox, and block Google's tracking completely. The later should probably be a best practice for IT anyway.

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

#233

Post by Traubenfuchs »

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…

Custom blocking rules based on css class / dom id... If I don‘t just close the page out or anger.

What‘s up with those videos? How do the increase positive metrics for websites?

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

#234

Post by dredmorbius »

userbinator wrote: post #231
dredmorbius wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another organisation's guiding principles suggest an alternate viewpoint: Individuals must have the ability to shape the internet and their own experiences on it. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

Mozilla's slogan used to say "putting users in control", which was then silently(?) replaced with "individuals": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040344 It's a very convenient phrasing, because these "individuals" certainly are doing what they say; it's just that they are not you . I trust Mozilla only slightly more than Google.

I see "individuals" as generally preferable to "users", though possibly less clear as to ... er, use role.

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

#235

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#236

Post by manigandham »

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.

That's how autoplay videos were originally implemented on mobile browsers. Implementations included GIFs, or giant JPGs of stitched video frames switched out with JS. Some even used video decoders that were transpiled to JS and there are webassembly versions now too.

It was all replaced when browsers finally implemented video tags that played in screen, but the tech still exists.

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

#237

Post by weknowbetter »

mobilemidget wrote: post #213

I just noticed the first, Netflix like, 'are you still watching' challenge on YouTube, never had that before.

This happens to me a lot, but my use case is "watching" full music albums all day. Usually halfway through every other album it will pause and ask I'm "still watching".

I usually just use the media controls on my keyboard to un-pause it without actually clicking the modal.

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

#238

Post by kelnos »

octoberfranklin wrote: post #174
kelnos wrote: 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.

From a tech geek perspective, Firefox is the "emacs of browsers". 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…

Not sure where you're getting your information, but the majority of Firefox is written in C++, not Javascript.

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

#239

Post by kelnos »

Termious wrote: post #182
kelnos wrote: 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…

Yeah, that's almost certainly true. I hadn't considered the advertising angle, since I generally don't see ads. But most people do.

I guess what baffles me even more is the talk on HN whenever something bad about Chrome comes up; it seems like most of the people commenting in those threads... run Chrome. Why? I'm not saying Firefox is perfect, and there are certainly places where it's lacking when compared to Chrome, but you'd think that the HN crowd (which, I know, isn't a homogeneous bunch) would largely be Firefox users.

I see so much posted on HN about outrage over privacy issues (in general, not specific to Google/Chrome), and yet... seems like most of those people use Chrome? It's confusing, to say the least. Switching to Firefox isn't going to fix everyone's internet privacy issues, but I find it hard to take someone seriously when they simultaneously rage about online privacy and use Chrome.

> 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?

Is this still true, though? I seem to remember seeing something like that 5+ years ago, but I use GMail and Docs all the time, and never see anything that tells me to install Chrome.

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

#240

Post by kelnos »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #223
kelnos wrote: 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.

> but since Firefox Quantum those reasons have largely disappeared. I don't think so. I switched to firefox as my main browser. Firstly there are few sites that only work in chrome so I kept chrome installed. Secondly at least to me, it is noticeably reduced battery life with firefox. Why did I switch then? Mostly for privacy and control, and the tab management which is much better in firefox.

> Firstly there are few sites that only work in chrome so I kept chrome installed.

That's sorta reasonable I guess? Is that normal, though? I don't think I ever run into sites that only work on Chrome. Occasionally I run into sites that don't work, but that's pretty much always due to my adblocking settings.

Secondly at least to me, it is noticeably reduced battery life with firefox.

I find this odd, because I run Linux, where battery life is supposed to be terrible (vs. Windows on the same hardware), and yet I can leave Firefox idling with 500+ tabs open and the battery will still take 4 hours to half-drain.

For both of these things, though, I find it hard to believe that the average internet user would think to blame Firefox. Site isn't working? Site must be broken, oh well, I'll do something else. Battery seems to be draining faster? Weird, maybe I have a virus, I'll get my family tech-savvy person to reinstall Windows or something.

I guess it just makes me sad that "my battery doesn't last quite as long" is for some people -- especially those who post on HN who clearly use Chrome -- more important than not running a browser that serves mainly to drive Google's advertising and tracking machine. (Glad to hear that you, at least, weighed both sides of it and came to what I consider a better conclusion.)

Either way, I stand by my opinion that the causes of the pre-Quantum gripes are largely gone. No, not 100% gone, but I feel like we're well past the point that Firefox's remaining issues are more important than doing something to reduce privacy leakage.

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