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New autoplay policy in Chrome

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91–100 of 178 posts

Re: New autoplay policy in Chrome

#91
post #46

> This way, Chrome gives you a personalized, predictable browsing experience. > predictable What could possibly be more predictable than disabling autoplay altogether? Google says it enabled autoplay for 'over 1000 sites', but we all know Google only cares about one thing and that is playing more ads on YouTube.

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.

Not really. I might want to watch the video but not right now. And then you have stuff like rickrolling, or just a video you want to see what it is before playing. Chrome used to even autoplay YouTube videos in background tabs, so if you cmd-clicked several videos to queue up in tabs, it would play all of them at once. Idiotic.

Re: New autoplay policy in Chrome

#92
post #65
post #46

Earlier 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.

saying an advertisement company mostly cares about playing ads doesn't register as cynical to me.

Right. Of the main browser vendors, Safari and Edge's conflict of interest is they'd prefer people make native apps over webapps. Chrome's conflict of interest is they don't want you to block ads. Firefox is the only browser with user-aligned incentives (as long as they ignore who pays a lot of their income...)

Re: New autoplay policy in Chrome

#93
The only thing I want is to turn off sound from the start, in my browser at work.

(Unfortunately, the PulseAudio volume control doesn't show Chrome in its "applications" tab before it has played a sound.)

Re: New autoplay policy in Chrome

#94
post #93

The only thing I want is to turn off sound from the start, in my browser at work. (Unfortunately, the PulseAudio volume control doesn't show Chrome in its "applications" tab before it has played a sound.)

I don't know if that is possible, but you can mute individual web pages (seemingly based on domain name) and they will stay muted until you say otherwise. Works for me pretty well.

Re: New autoplay policy in Chrome

#96
I wonder how much I need to know to predict the outcome for a certain website and how they see what the highest percentage of visitors does.

Do they see through Google Analytics or do they send my behavior to their servers when I am using Chrome?

Re: New autoplay policy in Chrome

#97

On a 1366x768 screen, that blog was painful to read. The header and top menu stuff take up about the top 1/4 of the window (and only folds away near the bottom of the page), and the "related articles" takes the bottom 1/4. Clicking the button to hide related helped some. My autoplay desires are pretty simple. If the site's Youtube, Vimeo, or another site that exists purely for video, I expect videos to autoplay. It'l…

Reader mode (in Safari or Firefox) removes all the cruft

Re: New autoplay policy in Chrome

#98
Preroll (IMA3) integration with an HTML5 video player is a really tricky dance when you’re trying to support mobile/desktop browsers with a resilient and consistent video player experience. Autoplay has been one of the most difficult differences to manage across browsers.

There’s no browser api that tells you if autoplay is supported, and you won’t get meaningful errors when you try to autoplay when you can’t.

Ultimately the right solution is to just-don’t-autoplay-ever, but it’s a hard sell when you see a 20-40% drop in VOD begins when you remove autoplay.

I’m not sure how to even approach Chrome deciding to autoplay “sometimes”. You have to tell the video player to autoplay a video a.m3u8, but swap that out for preroll.m3u8 before you know if any of it is going to work at all. If it fails, you’re gonna see weird errors in IMA3, or at the video player level, none of which really help you decide how to gracefully handle the situation.

So yeah, if you have client-side preroll, just don’t autoplay I guess.

Re: New autoplay policy in Chrome

#99
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Try to get it to learn yc = news.ycombinator.com took a fair amount of jimmying to get it to learn it after a browser user switch.

Re: New autoplay policy in Chrome

#100
> Chrome does this by learning your preferences. If you don’t have browsing history, Chrome allows autoplay for over 1,000 sites where we see that the highest percentage of visitors play media with sound. 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.

Not good enough. I can't even disable autoplay using Chrome's configuration. It doesn't work... but it works on FireFox.

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