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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

This is because of animated GIFs. If you disable muted video people will just use GIFs instead and it'll chew up way more of your bandwidth than a video file would. If you disable animated GIFs someone will make a JS library that recreates it, using (probably) even more bandwidth and CPU cycles.

This was the case on mobile until recently (maybe a couple of years?) and the benefit to users after the change is obvious. I get the frustration but it's very much a real-world compromise with good reason. I do think that they could make this a configurable option though, much like disabling JS.

EDIT: looks like they did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19077887

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Yup. A friend working at an ad company told me when video playback is disallowed, they stream a series of JPEGS and show them frame-by-frame in sync with web audio. I saw it over two years ago. The playback looked stuttery, but it still worked.

I know last year Chrome disallowed auto playing web audio, but they probably found a way around that too. Their scripts ran directly on the host's page (not in iframe), so they could probably trigger playback after any mouse event anywhere on the page.

I disable autoplay and it usually works. I close the windows where it doesn't work and that works for the remaining cases.

I think the sites trying to do end-runs are generally low-quality and it will be relatively easy to ignore them. Sites like the Atlantic, The New Yorker, and etc don't do end-runs and so disabling makes my experience sooo much better.

There's a massive middle in there of HuffPost, Forbes, and their ilk (each is probably an arm of a content marketing villain such as Demand Media or similar) who will autoplay for you all day long if you want. Maybe even on every story.

Why would they go to all this effort? Clearly, this is to play video to users who clearly do NOT want video auto playing. All you accomplish is pissing off the user and wasting your own bandwidth.

If I came across a website that did this I would probably never come back.

"Sure those users usually hate auto-playing videos, but they'll love our auto-playing videos! We don't want them to miss out!"

They get paid to deliver videos, no matter what.

This.

Too many clients (from an agency perspective) are implicitly given good advice "Your potential customer base isn't interested in this" but someone has to ask "How do we get them to see it anyway?"

They have forgotten that potential customers don't have to do business with them. They have options. Time for folks to re-read Seth Godin's "Permission Marketing", it seems.

Marketers for ad companies live in a world of self delusion.

The ad companies don't necessarily care about whether or not the ads help their clients' brands. They don't get paid for that. They get paid for other things, like delivering impressions.

The site that the ad runs on might care about how this affects reader loyalty, but, if they've decided to go with ad networks, they have rather limited editorial control over what ads the networks choose to run on their sites.

See your misconception here is thinking that any ad company sees you as anything more than just some eyeballs to be ruthlessly mined for money and data.

They don’t give a toss how you actually feel about the ad. They don’t care that it’s wasting bandwidth, they’ve got ads to show you and nothing should stand in their way as it’s evidently their divine right because they’re gods gift to the internet.

> They don’t give a toss how you actually feel about the ad.

Of course they do, their money depends on having people engage with those ads.

Not necessarily. Impressions are important too. Just because you don't think you noticed that annoying (random example) coca cola ad doesn't mean that it won't unconsciously influence your decision to put that into your tray instead of Pepsi next time you're at the grocery store.

I’m probably in a minority but I consciously and intentionally penalize ads that bypass my psychotic-level blocking. Getting me to notice their ad will cost them, I make sure of it with vindictive fervor.

Same, I don't understand why more people aren't like this

Yeah, so they do care about how you feel about the ad. If you associated that ad with bad feelings you might not want to buy that brand next time you see it.

Well, it's not like most visitors have adblock disabled except for websites with annoying ads.

So, for those visitors who have adblock, you don't do any more harm by serving annoying ads.

For those who don't have adblock, well, you do do harm, but the cost gets spread over the entire ad industry, which is why adblock usage has grown [0]. On the other hand, the money made from serving the annoying ad and getting the impression comes directly to you (and not the industry).

In short, benefit is immediate to you. Damage is delayed and doesn't come directly to you.

Anyway, I despise this kind of reasoning.

ps. People who worked there seemed quite decent. And that somehow showed in part of their biz practices too. E.g. they intentionally refrained from tracking visitors.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/804008/ad-blocking-reach...

This is commonly called tragedy of the commons.

answer: money

Compile your own video decoder to webassembly and render the video to a canvas.

What does your friend think of this?

This is just more fuel to add to the pro-ad-blocking argument.

Ad companies are filth.

>Ad companies are filth.

To be honest, I am wondering more and more if those aggressive unwanted advertisement are having an impact on peoples behavior and emotional baseline. Similar to road rage. Except you dont always sit in your car, but most of us spend significant parts of their lives in front of screens.

And a lot of things that are "animated gifs" really aren't animated gifs anymore, they're using audioless video players. So if you stopped autoplay, everything from gfycat, imgur, and similar would stop playing.

... until clicking the play button.

Or until the user switches to alternate browser like I will if Firefox doesn't autoplay soundless animations.

It would take a lot more than that for me to switch from Firefox.

ok bye

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments so we don't have to ban you again? Your substantive posts are just fine.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

or if it allows to whitelist those domains.

And when people browse Reddit, do you think they want to individually press play an extra time on each and every video that they look at? Of course they don’t!

So everyone ITT saying that “nobody wants automatically playing videos”. Actually yeah, we do, and there are many, and I mean MANY of us.

Whitelist Reddit then. Or turn on autoplay for all websites.

Or maybe we can take the current approach and leave a sensible default for the people who aren't savvy enough? And people like you and I can just toggle the option?

Do the majority really want autoplay? Facebook forced it on people and made it hard to find the disable option.

On pages that I go to specifically to play a media file, yes. Maybe a reasonable middle ground would be that each page can auto-play a single video element?

There are probably uses that I'm not thinking of (or don't partake in) where this would still be a problem for people.

Well, I'm the only person I know personally that spends time browsing reddit on his phones (because on a PC videos do not autoplay), and I've installed a different client mostly because it won't autoplay anything.

But I do have a lot of friends that spend time browsing facebook, and not a single one likes autoplaying videos, either wanted or unwanted ones.

Videos do not get into your screen at the same exact time you focus your attention on them. On the occasion that you'll want to watch the video, autoplaying just forces you to see a lot of out of context spoilers and video endings.

Sure but I prefer the Internet to look less like Imgur and gyfcat so that would be a feature.

And you will be able by installing an addon, accept that you're a minority and most people want autoplay on their GIFs.

Don’t tell me what to do.

accept that you're a minority

This seems like an assertion in advance of evidence.

To be sure, the entire internet-using public does not get a vote on the issue, aside from browser configurations and plugins (which the people who deny us a vote pay PR agencies to hate). Just like in other instances of disenfranchisement, those who aren't allowed to vote are indeed considered to be "minorities," even if only in the amount of political power they wield.

Thank you for helping me realize what's been bothering me about software for the last decade or so. I've been experiencing an increasing apathy and dissatisfaction and I kept attributing it to "age" -- 40 is not that much, true, but I had no better hypothesis until now.

Basically, what bothers me is that most of software being developed nowadays treats users like shit and the excuse is always along the same lines: "We ensure that we do what users want, by measuring their response, and if they didn't like it they would use something else".

Turns out, you can't go anywhere else if everything is corrupted through same perverse incentives and you don't have the power to change it yourself. Back when most users were more computer-savvy, the users had more power. Obviously, we can't go back to computers being mostly a hobby for geeks, but there has to be some kind of a solution to put more power in users' hands. I just can't think of one.

You have to fight universalism in all its forms. Whether you agree with the default behavior or not, if people feel strongly about another option then let them have it by changing a config setting. Resist the "it must be this way and no other" crowd. Even if the config is as user-unfriendly as about:config, it's there. If you find it impossible to convince management that the slight increase in maintenance is worth the flexibility of both the software and end user usage, expose it anyway for "testing purposes".

Maybe education ?

That sounds amazing. The only thing worse that autoplaying videos is 30 of them autoplaying at the same time. Let users opt-in to autoplay rather than opt-out.

10% of users will be thrilled and the rest will switch back to Chrome where the internet still works how they expect it to.

What was the reason that made the hypothetical 90% go for Firefox in the first place? This seems like the kind of feature one would expect when installing Firefox.

Mobile addons, privacy respecting defaults, not wanting you to be logged into a Google account all the time?

I don't think "makes imgur gifs stop playing" is going to attract more users than it drives away. By all means have that as an option, but it'd be a terrible default experience.

Mozilla demonstrated they don't care about retaining old users when they broke all the extensions in 57.

If you made videos stop playing, users could switch to Chrome as a fix when their gifs stopped playing.

Firefox 57 changed to using a more limited extension system like Chrome already had, so it's not like users could jump ship to Chrome to get back Firefox 56's more powerful extensions.

You may not have liked or agreed with that change, but I don't think it actually drove people to alternative browsers. If anything they might have said "Well, I have to going extension browsing anyway to find new ones that work, maybe I'll take a look at the options in Chrome too."

If I hadn't already been running Pale Moon on Windows, it would have made me switch to it.

And now a short time later they basically all work again but its better than ever and less work to maintain your extension.

No kidding... I generally hit a few aggregation sites and open a dozen or so new tabs in the morning. Nothing is more annoying than finding the one playing audio... or worse when you get to the tab which had auto-play video (muted) and had already passed the video in the link I'd even been interested in and onto something unrelated.

you're just repeating the previous comment

They would stop playing? Sounds like a feature, not a bug!

> everything from gfycat, imgur, and similar would stop playing.

Yes, this would be what I want.

Agreed, but when I (pre-66) disabled animations, I didn't see an obvious UX element for "no, go ahead, this one's cool".

Edit: Actually, it seemed to be hit-or-miss. Some gifs work, some refuse to play at all.

What I've been looking for is just a way to limit bandwidth down to something very small for certain tabs/pages. So, for instance: Washington post/buzzfeed/huffingtonpost/vox/vice etc. all get limited down to like 25kbps. They can try and play video, or steam jpgs, or whatever else they want, but I'll never see it because I don't have the bandwidth.

If that caught on, hopefully it would also be the end of gigantic, unnecessary UI libraries.

I'd take a slightly different approach: A site is allowed a maximum file size and a maximum number of bytes per page. Anything over that will simply fail to load.

I’d love a way to enforce other resource limits as well - cpu, for example. And maybe also a “maximum rate of pixel change” to kneecap the inevitable end-runs around autoplay being disabled.

Oh dang, maximum refresh rate would be a really cool plugin. I actually am sortof in love with that idea!

I'd peg that at '0' unless some override was clicked.

>> If you disable animated GIFs someone will make a JS library that recreates it..

Let's disable that too. My browser is not someones corporate programming play room.

Most users including myself disagree with you. I don't mind autoplaying silent gif's, in fact on some sites (youtube) I WANT autoplaying video with sound.

Will second that. I definitely view autoplaying gifs and videos (no sound) as a really nice feature. I'm glad for it.

> If you disable muted video people will just use GIFs instead

Let them. And we'll fight that too. We are all still not closing pop-up windows like the yesteryears of the internet because we refused to accept it.

Who is "we"? Because the vast majority of users love their animated GIFs. Just look at any social media site. Pop-up windows were easier to banish because people didn't want them. Autoplay, with-sound video too. But animated GIFs are popular.

Personally I don't care for them. I don't care for emojis either but good luck to anyone who wants to take either away from users, particularly in a competitive product like a web browser where users can just switch to an alternative.

I’d be fine with either whitelisting sites or having a button on each gif which starts the animation.

Ok, but that's not the point though? The assumption is that The Average User wants these soundless video gif-likes to autoplay. But The Average User never wanted popups. If you don't want them to autoplay, there probably is a setting or extension for it.

That would be way too complicated for the average user who wants their gifs to play. Given what you want is atypical, isn't it reasonable to expect you to configure it manually? Why should everyone else have to manually enable gifs when that is by far the more common preference?

Is it? Where are you guys getting your stats in this?

Personally I feel like gifs are annoying and distracting.

Come on, be realistic. Tumblr didn't become a billion dollar business just by having good SEO. Lots of people enjoy scrolling through pages of gifs and they won't be satisfied with click-to-play on 100 different 5 second long animations.

> Because the vast majority of users love their animated GIFs.

Then they can choose to play it. Just like you can opt to allow pop-ups in your browser. Nobody is asking for a one-size-fit-all solution - all they are asking for is choice and control over their browser.

> Nobody is asking for a one-size-fit-all solution

Right, because that isn't possible. Instead you choose sensible defaults that match what users want. Like it or not, the majority of users want autoplaying GIFs.

> all they are asking for is choice and control over their browser.

Which you have. It's a configuration option to disable autoplaying muted video.

> the majority of users want autoplaying GIFs.

That's an assumption. If you ask users if they want gifs or no auto playing video ads they will choose the latter. And if they don't, so what let them choose.

> If you ask users if they want gifs or no auto playing video ads they will choose the latter.

And that’s a false equivalence. I am able to block annoying ads with an adblocker and simultaneously enjoy my desired auto playing muted videos just fine.

> It's a configuration option to disable autoplaying muted video.

Please, what is the name of this one now? And do you know one for disabling autoplaying GIFs too?

EDIT: Oh, it's media.autoplay.enabled, another discussion has it. Thank you for pointing it anyway.

If you block animated GIFs, then sites will load a set of images and use DOM APIs to flip through them. Or perhaps they'll write their own video decoder in JS and draw frames to a <canvas>. All of these are much worse for users than letting the site use a proper video codec.

So "fighting that too" ultimately means blocking by default either Javascript or all images. Good luck with that in a mainstream browser.

You do realise reloading 100 images in JS would be easy for the browser to detect and just disable JS when it finds that happening. I.e. similar to how pop up blocking works. Detect misbehaving, prevent it, ask user to allow it. Same goes for canvas misuse same goes for bandwidth misuse.

Fighting that too is exactly what we need. Don't be such a push over.

For what it's worth, disabling JS today is actually more reasonable than it was 10 years ago. CSS and HTML actually gets you most of the way there now. (Talking about news style/blog sites, not web apps)

Maybe we should be aiming for that?

> You do realise reloading 100 images in JS would be easy for the browser to detect and just disable JS when it finds that happening.

Your proposal breaks Google Maps, as well as thousands of other sites, in order to implement an ineffective heuristic that pages can easily bypass by disguising image data as other data.

> For what it's worth, disabling JS today is actually more reasonable than it was 10 years ago. CSS and HTML actually gets you most of the way there now. (Talking about news style/blog sites, not web apps)

> Maybe we should be aiming for that?

Trying to use 10% market share to push the Web to disable JS is a good way to make that market share 0%.

So come up with another way, maybe rate limit changing an image's source? Rate limit creating new, visible, image nodes? Just because ad pushers will try to work around something doesn't mean we should just give up. At some point the worsening user experience will negatively impact a site's reputation and people's willingness to view/use it.

The other assumption here is that the bad actors are actually ad pushers. In fact somewhat reputable news sites like SFGate often push auto playing videos that take a few seconds to stop/close. The likelihood of SFGate, WaPo, or the BBC going to such lengths to display videos seems low — especially since the more aggressive solutions require more bandwidth.

> At some point the worsening user experience will negatively impact a site's reputation and people's willingness to view/use it.

You'd think so, but the same argument is used to claim that blocking isn't needed at all. "Obnoxious ads will negatively impact a site's reputation and people's willingness to view/use it."

Another problem with adding rate limits or other ever-increasingly complicated heuristics is that it makes the Web platform ever more difficult to deploy applications on. You may not see that as a problem, but it pushes app developers to support only native platforms --- where you can't block anything. More unintended consequences.

Web browsers are part of a complex ecosystem where seemingly straightforward actions have all kinds of unintended consequences. Browser developers think about these things all the time and have, in some cases, decades of experience dealing with them, yet they constantly get lambasted by armchair strategists who've thought about these issues for five minutes and decided it's all easy.

Your argument from authority doesn't really add any weight here.

We have already mostly solved the problem by playing whackamole for a few years. Ublock mostly have things solved now. Sure some lists are over the top but for the most part it just works.

Maybe you're just jaded and thing it's too "user land" or something but from my perspective the browser should be urging developers toward non shitty user experiences.

Because I know the ad pushers are basically never content with n-1 ads.

Native server side ads would be brilliant by the way. The ad quality drastically shoots up when the buyers have to trust the people pushing their ads.

Whitelist Google maps. Man your arguments are weak and defeatist.

JS "motion JPEG" is actually computationally cheap to do at least in Firefox, it just burns a megaton of RAM.. https://sweetness.hmmz.org/2014-04-16-portable-9-22x-compres...

That's an interesting blog post. Are you the author?

It seems that we need per webpage/domain/tab limits on bandwidth, cpu and memory usage.

Aside from all the problems this would cause with long-lived single-page applications and legitimate uses of high bandwidth (YouTube, Netflix, streaming radio, etc), I think you'd run into the same thing as the comment you're replying to is getting at: developers will find a workaround, and it may be worse than the thing you were originally trying to prevent.

I was recently researching the save-data header for one of my sites to not start caching video files on metered connections.

Its still a nascent thing only found in Blink browsers but at least its something.

https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/o... for reference since I hadn't heard about it before.

Totally. I hate browsing to my local news site - SFGATE because it is always crashing my browser. They have multiple videos autoplaying and even blocking the content on the page. So frustrating.

> This is because of animated GIFs. If you disable muted video people will just use GIFs instead and it'll chew up way more of your bandwidth than a video file would.

I wish there was an option in browsers to prevent the downloading of GIFs (especially on mobile). It used to be useful for artwork, but PNG has taken that over.

img[src$="gif"]{ display:none; }

edit: at least it prevents them from being displayed :P

That will match images whose name ends in "gif", but won't match "/foo.GIF" or simply a "/foo" that is a GIF. You can't tell what content type the server thinks the image is until you get the content-type header, and you can't tell what it actually is until it's been downloaded.

It's a good 99% solution.

Most gifs being served on the web aren't .gif files anymore, but .webm or .mp4 files instead. That css wouldn't even stop half of the gifs most users see on a daily basis.

I can assure you that:

1. The solution as posed works remarkably well. I know this because I use it myself.[1]

2. Extending the pattern to either be case-insensitive or include other animated image formats is pathetically trivial.

________________________________

Notes:

1. Specifically, in my "Annoyances" stylesheet, applied to all sites by default:

    /* gifs: So, it has come to this ... (xkcd) */

    img[src$=".gif"] {
        opacity: 0 !important;
        transition-delay: 3s;
        transition-duration: 1s;
        transition-timing-function: ease;
        transition-property: opacity;
        display: block;
    }

    img[src$=".gif"]:hover {
        transition-delay: 0.3s;
        transition-duration: 0.3s;
        opacity: 1 !important;
    }

The browser doesn't know the image is a GIF (content-type header) until after it starts getting bytes back. At that point the only way (pre HTTP/2) to stop the bytes is to close the connection, but this is terrible for performance because you lose keepalive and need to open a new connection.

If this was common, sites could also serve GIFs with an the content-type of a different image. Since browsers content-sniff between image formats, if the GIF was served as image/png then it wouldn't be until the image finished downloading that the browser would learn it was a GIF.

> if the GIF was served as image/png then it wouldn't be until the image finished downloading that the browser would learn it was a GIF

GIF has a header at the start of the file identifying it as such. It starts with one of two six byte long sequences identifying the version of the format that is being used.

0x47 0x49 0x46 0x38 0x37 0x61 ("GIF87a")

0x47 0x49 0x46 0x38 0x39 0x61 ("GIF89a")

So as long as the file isn't served with additional compression obscuringly applied on top (gzip etc) you will have an indicator that the file might be a GIF after downloading just the six first bytes of it.

Of course you could be unlucky and try to download a file that is not a gif but which happened to start with either of those two sequences of bytes.

But you could:

- Stop downloading it if the URL was loaded via <img>, and place something like an image of the word GIF with a cross over it in the img tag.

- If it was loaded outside of <img>, let the user know that it was blocked as suspected GIF but allow them to override.

At least as a first step toward some kind of anti-GIF thing.

There's also setting "media.autoplay.default" to 1. None of that stuff works to turn off _all_ autoplay.

The concerns about animated GIFs and javascript obfuscated WEBMs and such only apply to sites that go out of their way to ignore the user's clearly stated preferences.

If fighting that sort of thing mandates an arms war, this is a hill we should be willing to die on. Battle until the bitter end, until the rivers run red with blood.

I'd really like them to add a play button for animated gifs too. And of course have them paused by default.

Solution: a browser plugin that converts the website to a PNG, segments it, runs OCR on it, and presents it to the user.

Note: the plugin could do this on a server, for the additional benefit of smaller bandwidth use.

So Opera Mini?

Could be. I don't know how well it implements these concepts, and it seems it only supports mobile phones.

This is exactly it. I'm building https://getartemis.app, which, as you can see on the home page, has an automatic muted video playing of the demonstration of the product. Most people without such autoplay will not want to click play, and thus my email sign-ups will decrease, which is the same rationale as every other site with autoplaying videos.

When I first learned Chrome disabled autoplaying videos, I converted my video, which was around 500 kB, to a GIF, which was now 30 MB, with a noticeable decrease in smoothness and quality. Companies will not stop autoplaying videos, they will merely find other ways around it, because autoplaying videos work for the vast majority of users.

Why wouldn't they block animated gifs as well?

why can't animated gifs be click-to-play as well?

Some browsers have an option to disable GIF animations, I use this option in Falkon browser

Firefox has it, too. The UI is missing, but you can toggle it in about:config.

    image.animation_mode    none

Thanks for this!

Thanks, I set it up now, does anyone know if you can do the same in Chrome/Chromium without extensions?

Chrome was one of the last to actually implement this feature. It took 8 years (!), and Animation Policy (part of the accessibilityFeatures api) still doesn't work that great, and is only available via extensions.

https://developer.chrome.com/apps/accessibilityFeatures#prop...

Animation Policy extension from Google: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/animation-policy/n...

So, don't animate the GIFs until the user asks to?

Call me crazy but we should deprecate gif animations.

Forcing higher cost to serve ads is not a bad thing...

The higher cost here is borne by the consumer though, not the advertiser. Javascript shims to 'play' videos do not cost the advertiser anything, just the user's electricity and (ultimately) society's energy usage.

Can you explain how servers and bandwidth that handle ads on ad network side would be unaffected by serving bigger loads?

If we are talking about society energy usage it would be ideal to ban ads/adtech entirely.

In the world of S3, cheap CDNs etc the cost difference would be negligible. The user difference would be more pronounced, though, as their limited bandwidth (particularly on mobile) is taken up downloading a bloated GIF rather than something more useful.

The consumer is already bearing an unreasonable amount of cost to support advertising. The philosophy here needs to shift from "You kicked over my sandcastle, what can we do to make you not want to kick over my sandcastle again" to "Advertisers are a parasite and need to be contained in a separate sandbox and never let out"

The idea that advertisers are the only thing enabling a free web is bogus and needs to be dispelled, the costs of hosting a small amount of personal content are negligible and prior to the advertising era the occasional dude with cash would just altruistically host random niche websites on a subdomain.

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