Google Chrome’s next update will finally block autoplay videos that have sound

https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/22/17150870/google-chrome-autoplay-videos-sound-mute-update

by john58 • 8 years ago

101 35 8 years ago

theverge.com

dawnerd2• 8 years ago

And you just know someone will find a workaround because annoying site visitors is SO in right now.

FreeFull• 8 years ago

Maybe have a separate autoplaying <audio> element, if it won't be blocked too

dawnerd2• 8 years ago

Worst case put it on click after a full screen signup modal that the same sites usually show anyways.

rainbowmverse2• 8 years ago

I don't want any auto-playing videos, sound or not. They always seem to pop up next to the text I came there to read. I can't focus with that.

idonotknowwhy• 8 years ago

Then use Firefox :)

deadlycrayon• 8 years ago

+1 It's trivially easy to stop ALL media from autoplaying - including gifs! It's wonderful (but sometimes jarring when I expect a gif to be playing already)

JoshMnem• 8 years ago

Firefox also lets you mute a tab without switching to the tab.

rainbowmverse2• 8 years ago

I tried it again recently. The mobile app is just too slow to start, and I'm currently stuck with a phone with too little memory to not autokill stuff. I realize Chrome's apparent snappiness is probably due to some questionable and likely anti-competitive integrations by Google, like Microsoft in the 2000s.

posterboy• 8 years ago

Also a consideration if hording tabs.

I am mildly annoyed by the memory usage taking almost 8 gb of ram for a mere 70 tabs [1].

I thought chrome had superior history search indexing full text once. Was that feature culled?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16560655

jasonkostempski2• 8 years ago

There's already a flag for that: chrome://flags Autoplay policy.

dvfjsdhgfv• 8 years ago

I can't think of one reason why it shouldn't be the default behavior.

drewg123• 8 years ago

However, it does not seem to work in most cases that I've found. I was super excited when it arrived, but I'm still hunting down the domains of auto-play videos and adding them to a blacklist manually.

The choices seem to be "document user gesture", "user gesture is required", "no user gesture is required", and "default". There needs to be a "never autoplay any media"

thirdsun• 8 years ago

Same here. However for me it's not only an annoyance, but since I'm on a metered connection (LTE with severe throttling after 50 GB only avoidable by buying extra volume), this is costing me real money. Opening a Bloomberg article in the background will happily autplay a series of videos I may not notice. And that's with uBlock Origin installed.

I just opened such an article and in the 5 minute window since I did so, the page consumed a cool 100 MB for a 2:20 video. It obviously gets worse with longer videos.

ordinaryperson6• 8 years ago

I don't see them turning off auto-playing videos on YouTube (after finishing watching one) -- seems a little hypocritical.

Netflix is now in this game too, auto-playing trailers as you scroll titles with no way to turn the feature off.

Clearly force-feeding users videos boosts traffic (or they wouldn't do it) but it annoys, what? At least 50% of users?

Laforet• 8 years ago

the option to turn off autoplay is clearly visible on top of your recommended queue

dharmab• 8 years ago

That option is to automatically switch to a new video after completing the current video. The link is about videos that start playing when you open a link- in YouTube's case, the first video in the queue.

loeg3• 8 years ago

They have a reasonably coherent generalization planned for this[0].

Chrome will track a user's actual video consumption habits per origin, and compare it to the user's total visits to that origin. Video consumption is judged to be intentional if play is longer than 7 seconds, audio is unmuted, the tab is active, and the video is bigger than 200x140 px.

Then, if the ratio of actual video consumption to visits is high enough, Chrome desktop will allow autoplay. (My read is that Chrome mobile will wholly disable autoplay.)

If you always pause / mute playback on news sites but let Youtube autoplay, Chrome will learn to allow Youtube to autoplay.

If you always pause/mute playback on Youtube, Chrome will learn not to autoplay Youtube.

You can see what inferences Chrome has made at chrome://media-engagement .

(I'm not a Google employee nor a Chrome developer and may be accidentally misrepresenting this policy, but I've attempted to describe it accurately.)

[0] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p...

brewdad• 8 years ago

Are those AND conditions or OR conditions on autoplays? If and, will we see these videos shrink to 199x139 to avoid tripping the detectors? Oh happy day, the pause button will be even smaller and harder to click!

ordinaryperson6• 8 years ago

How about just off by default? Seems pretty basic.

There are Chrome plugins that purport to do this but I still get auto-playing videos.

I don't want to train Chrome. I don't even bother turning off auto-playing videos b/c it's a hassle, I just stay on mute.

Don't ad buyers complain about all these fake views from auto-playing videos? I guess not, or if they do Google doesn't care.

colordrops• 8 years ago

I suspect the UX will be that once audio is enabled for any video in the page any subsequent videos will get a free pass, and not some special treatment for Google.

ordinaryperson6• 8 years ago

Yeah, I doubt they're white-listing their domains, my point is just they are (arguably) the worst offenders of auto-playing videos, so I take this announcement with a grain of salt.

ng-user• 8 years ago

I'm kind of shocked Netflix is going down this route, for some reason I never expected them to stoop this low.

ordinaryperson6• 8 years ago

I'm sure the metrics say it boosts engagement or they wouldn't do it, but to me it renders their UX unusable -- I can't read a description because the video is blaring at me.

nathcd• 8 years ago

Re: Netflix -- will this feature have control over media embedded via EME?

lostmsu• 8 years ago

Perhaps browsers just need to ask users if they want audio before letting sites play it. Like a permission.

aiCeivi9• 8 years ago

Doesn't scale. Firefox is already introducing option to block "notification permission" requests as all sites spam with it, even when it makes little to none sense.

jehlakj• 8 years ago

Higher priority should be to mute websites that don't have media content.

Two ideas: Either make it permission based like location, or have a master volume setting for sounds like rely on javascript (excluding html5, flash, etc.). I'm not 100% sure about the details for the latter, but that'd be very convenient.

I'm almost always caught off guard when a customer service widget pops up on the bottom right corner of the screen with an annoying bell sound.

Google Chrome’s next update will finally block autoplay videos that have sound

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