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Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

One of the nicer things about Flash is that it's easy to block en masse, which cuts out on so many visually distracting animated things.

One of my worries with HTML5 is that we won't have a good heuristic for preventing animation and video.

As it is, YouTube occasionally serves me up their HTML5 video player, and it's a significantly worse experience than the Flash one, for the simple reason that it autoplays, whereas FlashBlock will stop Flash autoplay. I can't tell you how many times I've been listening to a video, wondering why it sounds so awful, and then figuring out there's another video autoplaying in a background tab.

So we (or at least I) will need some way of killing / freezing HTML5 canvas, video etc. elements until the user assents to their animation.

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for the simple reason that it autoplays, whereas FlashBlock will stop Flash autoplay. I can't tell you how many times I've been listening to a video, wondering why it sounds so awful, and then figuring out there's another video autoplaying in a background tab.

The default behavior in Safari is not to play any content until the tab it's in has been focused - that goes for HTML5 video, Flash, QT, or what have you. Constant spot of annoyance for me anytime I'm forced into a different browser.

Chrome and FireFox have FlashBlock extensions and Chrome has a "Click to play" option in about:flags (but unlike Safari it is turned off by default.)

These features should behave similarly except it sounds like in Safari players are enabled by default when you visit a page but for these other browsers you will have to manually click on things to start them playing.

Safari has a similar plugin called ClickToFlash, but no Chrome-like option as far as I know.

FlashBlock just uses CSS to hide certain <OBJECT> and <EMBED> elements from the page; the same techniques work for <VIDEO> and <AUDIO> (My MuteTab Chrome extension (http://www.mutetab.com) does this) and I'm sure the same could be done for <CANVAS>.

If you want to completely prevent animation of the page, though, you'll need to disable JavaScript completely (as you can currently do in the NoScript extension), although this could be troublesome if the site requires portions of the JavaScript to operate.

Alternatively you can selectively block elements on the page by any DOM criterion. I use GreaseMonkey and jQuery for that, and I hear AdBlock allows you to ban DOM elements with a right-click.

As for trivial blocking, I observed an increasing number of <blink> Flash objects falling back to just as much eyesore animated GIFs. I don't think I'm ready to fall back to lynx/links.

But you can't block CSS animations though.

You can if the relevant files are served from a distinct location, which would be the case for ads.

If it's more closely integrated, then you have to either stop using the site or use something like GreaseMonkey.

Will ads use CSS animations? The most obvious candidate for ads seems to be canvas which is trivially easy to block. Just like Flash.

Either way, the way the advertising industry works there is going to be some sort of de-facto standardized way ads will be delivered – if only because those who display ads on their sites have to know what to expect and those who make ads want to re-use them everywhere. Finding those ads will be easy and I expect ad-blockers to be no less effective.

A Chrome/FF extension to disable autoplay seems trivial.

On the contrary, disabling CSS transitions and animations is going to be a dead easy way to disable animation without losing any functionality.

Vimeo HTML5 player does NOT autoplay.

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