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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

#61

Post by dmitryminkovsky »

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 problematic in many ways, but I'm glad there's at least one mega-corporation that's really staked out privacy and user experience as a selling point for paying customers.

[0] https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie-blocki...

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

#62

Post by gruez »

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 scroll.

I've tried changing the autoplay setting from "block audio" to "block audio and video", but that breaks sites, especially the ones that assume you have autoplay enabled and don't have controls available. It's also hard to know when something's broken. I see a static image and I'm left to wonder whether it's a video that's hasn't started yet or it's actually a picture. For some sites, blocking autoplay don't even prevent the videos from loading because they start video playback during an onScroll event, which makes the browser think the playback was user-initiated.

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

#63

Post by Razengan »

userbinator wrote: post #39
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…

Then maybe the solution is to also have the option turn off animated GIFs and perhaps frequent canvas repaints too; and not simply give up completely ! In any case, just leaving the option alone so at least it has some effect like it did before, would still be better than essentially a full surrender.

> Then maybe the solution is to also have the option turn off animated GIFs

Safari actually does that! At least on Big Sur, if you enable the "Reduce Motion" option in Accessibility Preferences, gifs only animate when you hover the pointer over them.

Feels a bit odd at first (e.g. on animated Discord emojis) but then it seems like an option that should have been there since forever.

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

#64

Post by throwaway189262 »

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…

Publishers found gaping holes in their blocking and response is to give up.

Firefox already has config options to disable image animations and canvas. I've had them on for ages and sites work fine.

Maybe they can re-enable popup windows too since sites replaced them with interstitials long ago.

Chrome's dominance needs to end, this is blatantly anti user. Google could have de-ranked sites with hostile behavior a decade ago and we wouldn't be dealing with any of this stuff. But they won't, because ad money.

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

#66

Post by fiblye »

userbinator wrote: post #39
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…

Then maybe the solution is to also have the option turn off animated GIFs and perhaps frequent canvas repaints too; and not simply give up completely ! In any case, just leaving the option alone so at least it has some effect like it did before, would still be better than essentially a full surrender.

This is the common sense solution.

And what sites are replacing videos with massive gifs? Buzzfeed-like sites have always been filling their pages with 250 megabytes of gifs. News sites with half a dozen autoplaying videos certainly won't be replacing their videos with multi-gigabyte gif versions. And it seems like detecting a large, constantly repainted canvas would be easy enough.

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

#68

Post by swiley »

userbinator wrote: post #39
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…

Then maybe the solution is to also have the option turn off animated GIFs and perhaps frequent canvas repaints too; and not simply give up completely ! In any case, just leaving the option alone so at least it has some effect like it did before, would still be better than essentially a full surrender.

This is infact a common feature on smaller browsers.

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

#69

Post by smoe »

airstrike wrote: post #20
untog wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I agree. But I think the early adoptors mattered back in 2008.I reckon, with the dominance they now have, they are fine with some developers moving to firefox while still having time to react if they pull too many "normal" users with them. Especially since Mozilla isnt exactly peak popularity in terms of vision either.

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

#70

Post by swiley »

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…

This. I’ve just gotten my pine phone and am going through all the trouble of recompiling basic software just to have a working phone that isn’t a “smartphone” and even I appreciated what apple did with mobile safari.
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