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Google has removed the option to disable autoplay from Mobile Chrome

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11–20 of 248 posts

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

#11
post #5
post #4

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.

Or maybe higher levels have had a cost/benefit analysis before letting this happen?

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

#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 there to avoid that issues.We found many websites having 100MB gifs that could be one order of magnitude smaller when implemented as .

(Disclaimer: I work on Chrome at Google, but not on media.)

[1]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list?q=media%20s...

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

#15
post #14

This could also just be a mistake. There's often regressions or bugs in mobile chrome.

I mean, the issue literally is that the option exists, it just doesn't work. It doesn't sound intentional.

But then again, it was reported 9 months ago. It should have been fixed by now.

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

#16
post #4

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.

The general tech community is a tiny fraction of their user base, though. Put simply, they don’t care.

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

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox on android did have the option to have ublock as an extension (luckily)

Yeah, which is why I stick with it even though they just butchered a few areas of the UI (most notably the home screen). Fortunately they seem to be listening to reviews and fixing things.

Does anyone know if there is a way in the new Firefox for Android to stop it from keeping my tabs open when I close the window without using "Quit"?

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

#18
There’s a [dead] post here from a Chrome engineer that links to the relevant Chrome issue:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=106364...

> 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 there to avoid that issues.We found many websites having 100MB gifs that could be one order of magnitude smaller when implemented as .

The logic kind of makes sense. Autoplay videos already have to be muted so there’s no issue with sound. And if you disable video then idiot ad providers will resort to alternatives that chew up considerably more bandwidth and/or CPU.

I guess they need a setting to disable all canvas tags and GIFs and all autoplay videos.

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

#20
post #16
post #4

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.

The general tech community is a tiny fraction of their user base, though. Put simply, they don’t care.

I subscribe to the idea that the tech community overlaps with the definition of "early adopters", who become zealots driving everyone else's adoption

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle

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