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Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

venturebeat.com

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Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#61

Post by kuschku »

danso wrote: post #19
artursapek wrote: post #14

Doesn't YouTube technically autoplay videos? Is this going to disable that?

The design document talks about applying a heuristic to determine which sites are expected by users to play video: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJ... > The Media Engagement Index (MEI) aims to provide a metric reflecting the engagement of a given user with regards to media playback on a given origin. The intent of this metric is to allow websites scoring high enough to be able to bypass t…

So, all existing pages get a bonus over new websites? That’s also suboptimal.

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#62

Post by wlesieutre »

msla wrote: post #58
wlesieutre wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Annoying people have always been annoying. But it increases engagement!!! I'm happy to see these changes coming.

Ad tech is indistinguishable from toddlers who haven't learned the difference between good attention and bad attention.

Is not that they haven't learned, it's that even if you're pissed at an advertisement or whatever other annoying thing they did, at least you're looking at it. And will probably remember it. That's what's important!

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#63

Post by dguaraglia »

k3oni wrote: post #26

Auto-playing crap bugs the hell out of me. Some news sites do it as well even when you go and Pause the player, it will go on and play ahead after a few seconds. Started using "Disable HTML5 Autoplay"[1] extension in Chrome and works great. I wish every browser would stop sound and video by default until i hit Play or have a setting for that. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-auto...

The latest craziness is "news" websites that have an autoplay video + an autoplay ad, and their actual content is just another video, because apparently reading 10 lines of text is harder than sitting through a two minute slideshow with the same ten lines of text and some pretty pictures. It's getting ridiculous.

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#64

Post by tomjen3 »

MBCook wrote: post #5

> The content is muted, or does not include any audio (video only) Sigh. So no surprise audio but nothing to stop the trend of silent video ads or (even worse) muted live TV? How about NO auto playing live video or files over 250k? Don't waste my bandwidth streaming stuff I'm not trying to watch.

As I recall they tried that, but the problem was that some ads would use a canvas to emulate video.

I have disabled js global in Chrome, but had to enable it for a lot of sites. That is pretty simple for me, but most people are not computer programmers; still if you have the technical chops, I recommend it.

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#67

Post by CM30 »

I'm probably missing something here, but the document says that media autoplay is allowed if visitors keep visiting the site and interacting with the video player:

> The MEI score will be computed as is: > If number_of_visits Return 0 > Else > Return number_significant_playback / number_of_visits

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJ...

Doesn't that mean some of the worst sites affected by this might still manage to get videos and sound files autoplaying?

Because if you go to a news site, it's quite likely you may end up watching a video about the story.

But at the same time... you don't want the background ads to automatically play, nor do you want said video playing by default on return visits.

Yet this system seems like it may allow the latter two things to happen.

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#68

Post by ravenstine »

danso wrote: post #19
artursapek wrote: post #14

Doesn't YouTube technically autoplay videos? Is this going to disable that?

The design document talks about applying a heuristic to determine which sites are expected by users to play video: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJ... > The Media Engagement Index (MEI) aims to provide a metric reflecting the engagement of a given user with regards to media playback on a given origin. The intent of this metric is to allow websites scoring high enough to be able to bypass t…

Ugh, that sounds dreadful. Doesn't this prevent anyone besides YouTube and a handful of other sites from establishing themselves as video hosting sites? Besides that, adding another hard-to-predict layer to the web is just... bleh. We shouldn't need heuristics to make the web a nice place to be.

Boycotts on website should start becoming a regular thing. I simply don't return to websites that pull shenanigans like autoplaying videos on scroll. If I must, I use archive.is so that crap gets stripped out and I don't give them a genuine hit.

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#69

Post by gaius_baltar »

andrewfong wrote: post #53
k3oni wrote: post #26

Auto-playing crap bugs the hell out of me. Some news sites do it as well even when you go and Pause the player, it will go on and play ahead after a few seconds. Started using "Disable HTML5 Autoplay"[1] extension in Chrome and works great. I wish every browser would stop sound and video by default until i hit Play or have a setting for that. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-auto...

I find the extension rather unreliable actually. There are a lot of sites (e.g. Twitter embeds) where turning off autoplay also seems to break manually clicking play as well (forcing me to temporarily disabled the extension and reload page).

> There are a lot of sites (e.g. Twitter embeds) where turning off autoplay also seems to break manually clicking play as well

Pretty sure this is by design, as Twitter wants that content to auto-play. Forcing a poor experience for people who use blockers and making us white-list their domain seems a suitable strategy.

It's something like Facebook chat in mobile mode. Facebook wants its cattle to install that spyware-ridden messenger, so first they disable chat/messenger in the mobile site (not sure they already killed it, last time I checked there was only a warning; need to create a new bunch of test accounts to check again). As people will fight the change by using desktop-mode in mobile (one of the best features of Firefox for Android), they have a incentive to make the desktop site intentionally unusable in touch devices.

Re: Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound

#70

Post by ehsankia »

dguaraglia wrote: post #63
k3oni wrote: post #26

Auto-playing crap bugs the hell out of me. Some news sites do it as well even when you go and Pause the player, it will go on and play ahead after a few seconds. Started using "Disable HTML5 Autoplay"[1] extension in Chrome and works great. I wish every browser would stop sound and video by default until i hit Play or have a setting for that. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-auto...

The latest craziness is "news" websites that have an autoplay video + an autoplay ad, and their actual content is just another video, because apparently reading 10 lines of text is harder than sitting through a two minute slideshow with the same ten lines of text and some pretty pictures. It's getting ridiculous.

I don't think it's a simple problem though. I want my videos on Youtube, Twitch and other similar sites to auto play, without having to click it manually every single time. We get into a whitelist/blacklist situation. The best way is to stick to one way, and allow users to fully unblock a site. Right now, it auto plays but you can fully blacklist a whole domain. I could also see it as everything is blocked and you whitelist Youtube. Maybe even automatically does it if you click play on a few videos.
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