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Auto playing media is not something that should ever be allowed anyway. Apple forcing sites to respect their users is actually a great reason to buy Apple products.

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Autoplay on page load, no. But you’re going to severely limit the web experiences available to Safari users (and probably in turn the number of people who use Safari) if you don’t allow some way of getting reasonable consent to auto play media after page load.

Currently most solutions are to load a number of empty audio buffers when the user first clicks and repurpose those for auto playing content later.

If a user has visited a multimedia focused web site (eg: online catwalk show), why not allow them to opt in for that session rather than force them to have a cut down experience?

Because allowing these perfectly reasonable things also means allowing abuse. We can't have nice things because of people who think they can just autoplay random stuff we don't care about while we're trying to concentrate on some text. There is nothing more aggravating than opening a website and having some unexpected loud sound start autoplaying.

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