Google Chrome’s next update will finally block autoplay videos that have sound | Hacker News Reader

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

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101 pointsjohn5835 comments

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.

Then use Firefox :)

+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)

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

Chrome does too. Just right click on it and "Mute site" will mute the domain. Forever I think.

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.

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

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

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

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"

I thought I was doing something wrong when I set the flag. Thank you for confirming it really doesn't work.

Guess I should have just preached "use Firefox" like I usually do. That's what I get for trying to see things from the other side for once.

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.

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?

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

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.

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...

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!

AND. Hence my use of the word, "and." :-)

I think you misunderstand the metric. Videos smaller than 199x139 will not qualify as "user intended to watch this video" and therefore Chrome will disable autoplay on those sites.

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.

>How about just off by default? Seems pretty basic.

No, I like having videos I actually want to watch autoplay.

Fine. But at least give me the option of turning them off. As stated above, even their hard-to-find flag settings don't seem to work.

Off-by-default is an option now for advanced users (such as might be reading HN). On the same page I linked in my earlier comment you are responding to, see:

> You can try out these new policies by setting the experimental flag chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy to "Document user activation is required." in Chrome 64.

Like you, that is my preference as well, and I have set the flag.

Doesn't work. Have you tried it?

1. Go to chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy

2. The options in the drop down are:

A. Default

B. No User Gesture is Required

C. User gesture is required for cross-origin frames

D. Document user activation is required

Select D. Relaunch. Go to ABC News. Autoplays videos.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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