Google show signs of reconsidering auto mute after developer critique

I’ll immediately switch to using any browser that blocks auto play by default on all websites without exception.

The Issue report is not very well done.

> Autoplay restrictions on the web have long been inconsistent and served only to impede legitimate use cases.

This is judgmental, and it is not backed up with any data. Has it really "served only" to impede the legitimate uses?

> I've described this in detail in the following blog

Blog promotion.

> What is the expected behavior? Allow audio playback on page load without any user interaction.

Definitively this is not the expected behavior. Chromium team has defined that no audio will be allowed until there is user interaction.

> Abusive content will just blare out audio at the first opportunity.

Yes. This is a red queen race. But doesn't means that it is not worth pursuing.

I think that the point is valid. But the premise of the report, it is not. With the goal of minimizing sound SPAM in the web, Chromium has imposed some drastic measures that require changes in the interfaces of a large unknown amount of Javascript code.

> "These restrictions require special coding to handle them. Instead, the browser could simply allow all playback attempts to succeed, but mute the master audio output. Then the browser can automatically unmute the master audio output the first time the user touches the screen (or whenever else it deems the user is OK with audio)."

The proposed solution is quite good. Let the browser show a button to enable sound like they did with pop-ups. So all the affected companies and individuals don't need to repeat the checks all over the internet, to create a unified experience and to keep legacy games and applications that have no chance of being updated.

But as another post says, there is a lot of corner cases. I can imagine a blind user wanting to have sound without having to read some text.

The company I work for was affected by this change. And there was a lot of problems in production. To fix it, people had to work the weekend. I know that should not be like that, that we need to improve beta browser testing, and such. But sometimes the realities of companies make this kind of behavioral changes difficult.

I hope that Chromium finds a good way of keeping ads muted, while not breaking the Internet.

Wouldn't this be easily resolved by giving the user the option upon visiting the site: "This website would like your permission to play audio. You can revoke this at any time."

Similar to how storing files or sending push notifications works?

That’s because the api is badly defined, the javascript call to ask for notification is syncronous so the browser need that annoying blocking popup insteas of something less invasive like the popup notification

Firefox -> about:config -> media.autoplay.enabled -> false

Edit: troydavis points out this Chrome option doesn't actually block autoplay: Chrome -> chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy -> Document user activation is required