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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

This is a very user-friendly feature, kudos to Apple for making the change. I hope other browsers follow in their steps.

I think every time I've encountered a website that autoplays video, it's been an annoyance. But maybe I haven't considered the topic with enough depth, what are examples of legitimate use-cases for autoplay video?

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One place I did a project for had a web based front end for a CCTV system that would autoplay video when navigating to a dvr, camera, etc. IOS was a PITA because it wouldn't autoplay and there were some significant UI tweaks around that difference.

Of course since this only effects video that includes an audio track it wont impact them. I can't recall anything that auto plays video with audio that wasn't user hostile.

Ubiquiti's [0] security cameras also transmit audio, so this may affect their live interface or that of similar products. I'm far more in favor of this new option than annoyed by needing an additional action to play the video though.

[0]: https://www.ubnt.com/products/#unifiVideo

There is a per site permissions system so you can allow the things you want.

It's not that there's no reasons to have them, it's that companies like CNN abuse the privilege cause their advertisers don't mind embellished numbers.

We use keyboard controls in our app (vidhub.co) to control media, looks like a Safari 11 user will no longer be able to just hit a key to start a video if Safari's "automatic inference engine" chooses to block us.

I believe you can disable the restriction for particular sites if required.

If it were up to me, they'd remove that ability altogether. Websites that screw with the keyboard are a huge pet peeve of mine.

A "keypress" event counts as a user gesture, so as long as your code looks like:

document.addEventListener('keypress', event => { if (event.key === 'space') video.play(); });

...then everything should just work fine.

YouTube. Netflix.

Websites I'd certainly whitelist.

Not to mention it still seems much more user friendly to make this opt-in rather than opt-out.

Oh, absolutely. I'd even expect them to be whitelisted by default (although that would pose the interesting problem of deciding which sites deserve the privilege of being whitelisted out of the box).

Unfortunately if there is a "default" whitelist, it will become a "whoever pays $x money gets on the defaulted list." (I'm not referring to only Apple but if Chrome, Firefox, etc come out with the feature).

Youtube autoplay is the devil. If you want to open some videos in several tabs, you have to individually pause every tab. It's a real pain. I'd much prefer it if Youtube autoplayed only when you switch over to the tab.

It does for me, using safari.

It already does behave like that for me. Definitely in Safari but I think in Chrome too.

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