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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

On one side, I can certainly understand why Apple went with this, even if it drives me nuts that Safari@iOS can't do inline play at all (because it prevents nice artistic stuff using a canvas overlaid over a video element, for example), even if the play action is user-initiated.

On the other hand it takes away a LOT of flexibility - seriously, I don't want to do 50MB GIFs for animated background or weird JS trickery when I can use a 2MB video for the same effect.

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> ...it drives me nuts that Safari@iOS can't do inline play at all...

Safari on iOS can now do inline playback! Just add a "playsinline" attribute to your <video> element: https://webkit.org/blog/6784/new-video-policies-for-ios/

Also make sure to remove the audio track!

The default is to still auto-play silent movies (movies with no audio track or with the muted flag). If you're just using this for a background effect, the best solution is to just get used to the fact that for a minority of users, the video won't work and you'll have to fill in something else (don't use a 50MB GIF, just go with something non-animated!), but a majority of users will still get the silent video.

Correct. A static image might be a good fallback for users who completely turn off all forms of auto-play. It's easy to detect auto-play is off and provide a graceful fallback.

When I am on my phone, having a monthly download limit of 2,5 GB after which my internet is cut off, I don't really want do download a 2 MB video at all.

I was not aware that "artistic" is now a synonym for "user-hostile". I promise you nobody wants to spend 2%-3% of their monthly AT&T data allotment on your partially obscured background video.

How about you just not have animated backgrounds? How does that possibly help usability in any way? All it does it waste bandwidth and CPU/battery

I'm glad they're taking away flexibility. I hope they entirely remove the ability to create animated backgrounds.

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