...Or you can just use Safari, which refuses to auto play any video with an audio track.
New autoplay policy in Chrome
111–120 of 178 posts
Re: New autoplay policy in Chrome
#112> As you browse the web, that list changes as Chrome learns and enables autoplay on sites where you play media with sound during most of your visits, and disables it on sites where you don’t. This way, Chrome gives you a personalized, predictable browsing experience. Predictable in a user application is the same result from the same action every time. UX changing based on opaque logic and heuristics is anything but p…
yeah, this seems like such an intense thing to do My bet is that they did this to not break Youtube. I mean it makes sense (you don't want video sites to not work) but it's also such a hacky sort of thing I don't get why they couldn't make this a permission thing like a mic. Ask the website to allow autoplay.
> I don't get why they couldn't make this a permission thing like a mic. Ask the website to allow autoplay.
...because then it's not autoplay anymore?
Re: New autoplay policy in Chrome
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cynicism aside, YouTube is a typical example of a good use for autoplay. A user clicking a link to YT almost always wants to watch the video. "Predictable" probably wasn't the right word for them to use, but I think this is a reasonable move by Google.
I don't want YouTube to autoplay, most of the time, I'm opening a lot of YT tabs at once and sometimes I need to seek out a specific one I am interested in most. It would be much nicer if the various plugins I use to control that behaviour wouldn't stop working every 4 months due to another youtube redesign (whether in UI or Backend on the Client).
The sane behavior would be to not autoplay video in tabs that open in the background. (I thought this was the default behavior in Firefox, but maybe not?) Other than that, the only solution is some kind of heuristic. If the reason someone clicks on the page is to play a video, it should autoplay: the click registers my intent. If the page serves some other purpose (channels on Youtube come to mind), nothing should autoplay.
Re: New autoplay policy in Chrome
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah, this seems like such an intense thing to do My bet is that they did this to not break Youtube. I mean it makes sense (you don't want video sites to not work) but it's also such a hacky sort of thing I don't get why they couldn't make this a permission thing like a mic. Ask the website to allow autoplay.
> I don't get why they couldn't make this a permission thing like a mic. Ask the website to allow autoplay. ...because then it's not autoplay anymore?
"Allow this website to automatically play videos in the future" sounds exactly like autoplay to me. Just not the first time.
Re: New autoplay policy in Chrome
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
And then there's Chrome, where you can start typing something in the URL bar, and it comes up with some results immediately, but in the milliseconds before you select a result it changes to something "better" so you go to the page instead. Infuriating.
I have pretty much the opposite anecdote: to me the Chrome URL bar is a magic component that finds any of the tickets I've lately worked on (from three different ticketing systems) with typing a few words/characters, knows that "n" is HN etc, "g" takes me to gmail.com etc. And all without any effort to manually teach it. Google Spreadsheets is where it often fails to work perfectly - hard to get it to take me to the…
I think one problem with the Chrome URL bar it's that it won't show rarely visited sites, so you have to go to history instead.
Re: New autoplay policy in Chrome
#116I'd rather just see an explicit white list based on user input.
Re: New autoplay policy in Chrome
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah, this seems like such an intense thing to do My bet is that they did this to not break Youtube. I mean it makes sense (you don't want video sites to not work) but it's also such a hacky sort of thing I don't get why they couldn't make this a permission thing like a mic. Ask the website to allow autoplay.
> I don't get why they couldn't make this a permission thing like a mic. Ask the website to allow autoplay. ...because then it's not autoplay anymore?
Go to chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy
Select `Document user activation is required` Relaunch chrome
Alternatively Mute sites that play sound from chrome://settings/content/sound
Which ever works for you
Re: New autoplay policy in Chrome
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't get why they couldn't make this a permission thing like a mic. Ask the website to allow autoplay. ...because then it's not autoplay anymore?
"Allow this website to automatically play videos in the future" sounds exactly like autoplay to me. Just not the first time.
I have developed an instinctual reaction to automatically deny permissions like remotely that for any website, and I think most people have. Websites asking for permission to send notifications provokes the same irritation. I think - "I am in the middle of doing something, I don't want to stop and think carefully about permissions for some vague and abstract future encounters, I want the annoying dialog to go away and the site to get out of my way."
Notably though: If some dialog like this came up even on a specific site like Youtube where I would almost invariably benefit from granting those permissions, I think there is a huge percentage chance I would knee-jerk deny the permission even when if I stopped to think about it, denying that permission would probably make my user experience worse. Lastly, there is an almost infinitesimal chance of me ever seeking out the settings to re-evaluate my choice on this.
Re: New autoplay policy in Chrome
#119>s you browse the web, that list changes as Chrome learns and enables autoplay on sites where you play media with sound during most of your visits, and disables it on sites where you don’t. What about disabling autoplay even without sound? Unwanted autoplay videos burn through battery even while muted.
They're just modernizing the idea of a GIF. The GIF format was used long after it should have been obsolete, because despite its limitations, it had the key advantage of providing simple, silent animations that autoplay. Now a lot of "GIFs" aren't in GIF format, they're videos with no sound, and that makes a lot of sense because it's 2018 and we've learned some things about compression and video since 1987. If silent…
you could also block GIFs from animating by default
Re: New autoplay policy in Chrome
#120> Chrome does this by learning your preferences... This way, Chrome gives you a personalized, predictable browsing experience. In my experience, "learning" and "predictable" do not go together.
Reminds me of fuzzy matching systems like Alfred that will try to learn which key combos you use to launch each app instead of trying to offer you predictability. But "fi " never launches Firefox anymore because of that one time you accidentally launched Finder instead. And since you keep accidentally launching Finder that way, it never learns that you want Firefox. So you try "f " but you accidentally launch Flux. A…
Sounds like the "classic" problem where someone wants to build a reinforcement-learning system (because "self-improving AI" sounds so cool) but don't actually have a suitable reward function that would describe their problem.
Nevertheless, they don't let themselves be caught up by this minor obstacle and use whatever random reward function they can implement with the data they have.
The resulting system won't actually learn to solve the original problem - but it will learn something, so, hey, it's self-improving!
See also: Probably every single recommender system in use. (At least that's my subjective impression)