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Comment by k3oni | Hacker News Reader

Auto-playing crap bugs the hell out of me. Some news sites do it as well even when you go and Pause the player, it will go on and play ahead after a few seconds.

Started using "Disable HTML5 Autoplay"[1] extension in Chrome and works great. I wish every browser would stop sound and video by default until i hit Play or have a setting for that.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-auto...

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The latest craziness is "news" websites that have an autoplay video + an autoplay ad, and their actual content is just another video, because apparently reading 10 lines of text is harder than sitting through a two minute slideshow with the same ten lines of text and some pretty pictures. It's getting ridiculous.

I don't think it's a simple problem though. I want my videos on Youtube, Twitch and other similar sites to auto play, without having to click it manually every single time. We get into a whitelist/blacklist situation. The best way is to stick to one way, and allow users to fully unblock a site. Right now, it auto plays but you can fully blacklist a whole domain. I could also see it as everything is blocked and you whitelist Youtube. Maybe even automatically does it if you click play on a few videos.

It could be a permission (like sharing location) or maybe a permission that can only be requested after the user clicks play on a few videos. (That would prevent me having to select "no" to every trash website that requests permissions, like Chrome allowed with pushed content permissions in the past.

> everything is blocked and you whitelist Youtube. Maybe even automatically does it if you click play on a few videos

That's basically what they're doing: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJ...

Is there anyway to wipe the whitelist?

If only you could somehow enable users to make decisions for themselves we could solve this....

Not really a solution. It works for repeat visits to sites users visit often, it doesn't really work at scale. Users want sane defaults; most of them will never change them. A world where sites are by default as malicious as users allow them to be is not a world where the internet is a friendly and powerful resource for everyone.

Making this a setting doesn't preclude sane defaults, like disabling autoplay everywhere except youtube.

It's even more complicated because I only want YouTube to autoplay when I open it in a foreground tab.

That is how YouTube behaves today. It doesn't play until you foreground the tab. I don't see why that would change.

It might if you implement a new system for how autoplay is decided. Not every browser avoids autoplaying YouTube in background tabs.

They do it because video preroll CPM is waayyy higher than display advertising. Like up to $15/cpm.. Multiples of that if you can get the right deals in place (not remnant).

Ohhhh, I see. I always wondered what the point was. Thanks for the clarification!

And this is why we can't have nice things. FWIW I agree with the decision to stop autoplaying, but it's worth pointing out that it does have negative consequences:

- Stops YouTube (et al) videos autoplaying (whitelist to fix?) - Probably stops games playing music when first opened (e.g., https://arcade.ly/games/asteroids/, although note I have settings to disable music and SFX)

God forbid we get to a point where automatic execution of JavaScript is disabled by default but I can see it going that way.

Like I say, I agree with the decision, but sadly all these fixes for reigning in the excesses of the worst scumbag websites make the web overall just a little bit worse for everybody. :/

We've had plugins to stop automatic execution of JS for a while. I used one for about 6 months, then one day I got a new computer and didn't bother to install it... it's only when I find pages like the one I described above that I think (for like two seconds) "oh, NoScript would've stopped that." So it's only a few bad players ruining it for most of us, as you say.

I find the extension rather unreliable actually. There are a lot of sites (e.g. Twitter embeds) where turning off autoplay also seems to break manually clicking play as well (forcing me to temporarily disabled the extension and reload page).

> There are a lot of sites (e.g. Twitter embeds) where turning off autoplay also seems to break manually clicking play as well

Pretty sure this is by design, as Twitter wants that content to auto-play. Forcing a poor experience for people who use blockers and making us white-list their domain seems a suitable strategy.

It's something like Facebook chat in mobile mode. Facebook wants its cattle to install that spyware-ridden messenger, so first they disable chat/messenger in the mobile site (not sure they already killed it, last time I checked there was only a warning; need to create a new bunch of test accounts to check again). As people will fight the change by using desktop-mode in mobile (one of the best features of Firefox for Android), they have a incentive to make the desktop site intentionally unusable in touch devices.

It has indeed been entirely disabled in the mobile site, and is nearly unusable if you request the desktop site (which of course can only be done through the browser settings, they don't provide a link for it). So I stopped using it!

mbasic.facebook.com lets me get messages and send them.

For Twitter, you can disable video autoplay in the account settings and whitelist twitter.com in the extension. But there are other sites where this doesn't work.

The problem is that HTML 5 video is really useful for replacing animated image formats. The technology in modern video codecs is way superior than gifs, etc., and the real impact of that is greatly reduced space/bandwidth consumption, like orders of magnitude better.

Just as we start to leave gif in the dust, Facebook pulls the dick move of auto-enabling sound on all auto-played HTML 5 content.

I think that Google's solution of refusing to autoplay videos with soundtracks is a good compromise which will allow us to continue to enjoy the benefits of modern video codecs while simultaneously preventing built-in video support from gaining the bad rap that got attached to Flash.

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EDIT: Reply to rhizome, since I'm not allowed to post for a while for having an illegal opinion on Kubernetes.

I'm not suggesting that the technology would be eliminated in its entirety, but disabling autoplay of all HTML 5 video neuters its use as a replacement for animated gifs.

Nobody's talking about eliminating HTML5 video as a technology.

Safari is going to stop Autoplay by default in High Sierra

That's what you get when you don't clearly separate text content from multimedia. With HTML5 it's all mixed together.

And now you end up with text content full of annoying interactions, and crippled down multimedia functionality.

The extension is no longer being actively worked on [1]. It works on some websites for now, but will probably be circumvented in the future.

[1] https://github.com/Eloston/disable-html5-autoplay/blob/maste...

>Some news sites do it as well even when you go and Pause the player, it will go on and play ahead after a few seconds

Perhaps even worse than that, some sites (including TIME, at least previously) unpause the video when you scroll.

I've noticed this on many other news sites recently as well. I hope this trend dies soon. This is an immediate "close tab" for me when it happens.

I use that extension too, but it has severe issues with newsweek, which seems to detect playback failed and retry many times per second forever.

I would argue in that case that newsweek is the one who has severe issues.

Problem with disabling autoplay completely is that it sort of breaks gifv and embedded content inside reddit and twitter. You sometimes need to press Play or space bar to get them going.

Thankfully in latest Safari you can check "Audio needs user action" which seems to solve the problem, although now some videos manage to start autoplay without my action.

Yay, let's install another extension with full access to all your stuff!

Don't get me wrong, i wish i wouldn't have to install one single extension and that this would be a built-in feature or that the website having a video to show me won't auto-play the damn thing from the get go, but this is the world we live in.

Autoplay blocking is built into Firefox via an about:config option. Much better than this half-baked solution that still permits annoying behavior.

Why o why is the sound always on max when it starts with autoplay?

Because it's a setting in the videoplayer initialization.

> I wish every browser would stop sound and video by default

Sound yes but why video?

Video often presents a significant visual distraction when one tries to focus on the text nearby.

It can bad enough that I'll find the auto-playing video element in my browser's DOM inspector and delete it.

Do you also block gif's and JS/CSS animations?

I do remove animated GIFs that distract my focus when reading text.

I haven't yet felt the need to block CSS animations. Up to now, UX animations aren't so distracting they impede my reading. I think this may be because CSS is generally not used in ways that constantly distract while reading text.

A CSS fade or transition on scroll doesn't bother me as much as animated video/GIFs.

EDIT: Clarity.

I basically never open a web page to look at a video. For me, it's a straight up waste of bandwidth.

I don't mind clicking on eg youtube videos.

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