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Comment by jimrandomh | Hacker News Reader

Currently they're saying:

> The policy will be re-applied to the Web Audio API in Chrome 70 (October). Developers should update their code based on the recommendations at: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p...

This is wrong and really needs to be reconsidered. Nearly all of the examples of broken webpages on that thread are write-and-forget games, which will never be updated; this plan would break them permanently, just to save a little engineering effort in Chrome.

The solution is simple: display a permissions request, like there currently is for camera, location and microphone. That's how it should've worked in the first place.

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A permissions request isn't a good solution. Instead of having to deal with auto-playing video on every other site you visit, you'd now have to deal with a permissions prompt constantly popping up.

IMO the best solution is to just mute the autoplaying media until the user interacts with the page. Completely transparent to sites, and doesn't burden the user with unnecessary pop-ups.

Permission request is not necessary a pop-up prompt. It can be implemented as an additional state of the sound playing icon in the tab's title for example, and I am sure that good designers can invent something better.

They already show an inline notification on the address bar when a page is trying to open a popup. They could've done the same for audio

> IMO the best solution is to just mute the autoplaying media until the user interacts with the page

This seems like a good compromise but doesn't sound like enough on its own. Sometimes I just open pages and look at the resulting video and it would be puzzling for it to be muted. Or does "interacts with" include merely viewing the tab? Even though it's religion for me, lots of people never or rarely ever "open in new tab". So this design change would eliminate the benefit.

I really think the only way to do it right is to require user action on each individual media element. If not as the default behavior, then any sane browser should provide a way to enable that behavior and have it actually work. Last I heard Chrome has an option that seems like it should work that way but it does not in practice.

If a game has multiple sound effects controlled by javascript logic, then what is the "individual media element"?

Good question. I was only considering typical animation/audio/video content. I'm concerned that Firefox doesn't seem to require any extra steps for games like the ones at https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tag=microgame . Unless my clicking on the thumbnail is considered activation.

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