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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

#161

Post by bad_user »

I don’t understand what’s the problem with auto-playing muted video.

Facebook and Twitter have been doing it in their apps. The mobile apps are more popular than the web pages. The exodus to native apps has already been happening. The web has evolved from the days of static text content, like it or hate it, if you stop the progress, the web will die.

And really, some suggestions don’t make sense. Stopping the auto-playing of GIFs? That’s the whole point of GIFs, and you’re 15 years too late.

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

#162

Post by kelnos »

Meph504 wrote: post #123
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.

Not sure how it would break the internet at all, can you say that you have ever had a user experience improved by auto playing anything? I mean, heaven for bid, they could the user the ability to actually control the repaint rate. Or pull only the first frame of a gif, and not pull the 100+ meg gif without user consent(via touch, by site, etc..) Browsers wouldn't block popups for years because it could break legitima…

Agree -- I mean even Buzzfeed of all sites usually doesn't auto-play their gifs[0]; you get a static image with a play button that swaps to the gif when you click it.

[0] Just realized while typing this that I haven't clicked a Buzzfeed link in a long time, so my memory might be off. But I know some site I used to visit frequently did this.

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

#164

Post by dingaling »

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…

Usually I select Reader Mode

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

#165

Post by egfx »

pvg wrote: post #153
aikinai wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except animated GIFs are the only way to have embedded "video" in Google Slides. (Yes, you can technically "embed" YouTube videos, but they play in the YouTube player with all of its chrome and only in widescreen with letterboxing if your aspect ratio doesn't fit)

Both are made by Google so this feels like one of the easier things Google can fix. Twitter and FB are essentially aGIF-less and they don't even make popular browsers!

Facebook plays gif in its native format and it doesn’t autoplay.

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

#166

Post by edoceo »

WWLink wrote: post #143
edoceo wrote: 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?

It would be nice if the browser knew how big the gifs were before it downloaded them, and thus didn't download anything over a certain size.

Isn't the size in the header? (Which yea, could be faked, or sent as Chunked) the USER-agent could just make a cap, and stop after 1mb when image/gif media type

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

#167

Post by jasonkester »

dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #61

A lot of comments here trying to explain this away but let me point out that Apple disabled autoplaying unmuted videos in moble Safari years ago (it's not even behind a setting as far as I know) and I can't imagine them backing off of that any time soon. On the contrary, Apple will savage decades old APIs just to marginally improve privacy [0]. Which is what Google would do if users were the customer. Apple is proble…

Apple was also the one who invented this terrible “individual video frames on a canvas” technique for their next device launch homepage, six months later.

It was literally to work around their own restriction:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4531088

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

#168

Post by adrianN »

madeofpalk wrote: post #112
edoceo wrote: 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.

It what way would putting a play button on gifs above a certain file size break the internet?

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

#169

Post by kungato »

baybal2 wrote: post #58
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…

Man, who came with that idea? I really want to know the name of that product manager. It takes only one of those 4k video ads to kill my data package within seconds, with me not even having an idea of that happening. With amount of stuff you threw at adblock before, I can not keep assuming goodwill from your side. Your explanation about "giant gifs" is so disingenuous.

I use the Firefox mobile option of not loading media on the site when not on wifi and it helps me stay on 300mb data plan easy

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

#170

Post by Zarel »

simias wrote: post #45
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…

That's what happens when you let anybody and their friends run arbitrary code on the user's CPU. Javascript running by default was the original sin, and now there's no going back. IMO it ought to have been opt-in for the websites that really need it (i.e. web apps I actually want to use, not any random page I happen to stumble upon). There's especially no going back for Google for whom it's very much a feature since…

This comment was downvoted at the time I'm replying to it, but it's honestly the only reasonable objection here.

The _only_ way to block autoplaying video is to block all animation, which means all of:

- animated GIFs

- nearly all JavaScript

- CSS animation

- partial rendering (showing the top part of a page before the entire page is done downloading)

Everyone else calling for just blocking animated GIFs and canvas is just going to be hit by even more CPU and bandwidth intensive workarounds.

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