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Comment by NIL8 | Hacker News Reader

OT... I am really annoyed that so many news sites set their videos to autoplay. Facebook does it too. This was bad in the old days when it was common and it went out of favor for good reason.

Note to those responsible (not that they'll read this): I might want to watch your video after I first read some text. When I hear the video start up while I'm trying to read, I immediately try to press stop. This usually takes several attempts because your video players are awful. Nine times out of ten, I will leave the site without watching your video or reading the text. I don't have time for the aggravation.

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In December, I got a virus likely from such auto-play videos.

Symptom and Solution. On Windows, kept getting auto-started instances program iexplore.exe running. Virus scanning for days didn't solve the problem. Finally a Windows system restore back to November or so did solve the problem.

Larger Solution. Of course, for each video clip on a Web page, Firefox and Flash keep saying that Flash is vulnerable. No joke. Then they refuse to play the video unless I confirm by clicking three times. So, great! Now those videos no longer auto-play.

Of course, for this benefit, I am still running version 12 or some such of Flash. So, after 12 versions, Flash still has bugs? So, I'm going to believe that 13 is such a lucky number that finally version 13 will be safe? Nope! So, I will stay with version 12 and, thus, block the auto-play videos. When I do want to play a video, it will be a significant video from a respected source and, thus, likely safe; I have to doubt that version 13 would be much safer.

There are other such frustrations at Web sites that still cause me to do what you do -- leave!

Yes! It's incredibly frustrating. I find a solution for one problem only to find out that the solution created a new problem. It's all because of sites like these. Maybe I'll just avoid these altogether or maybe I'll create a browser extension like Adblockplus that prevents me from following links to sites that are reported to have autoplay. What to do....

13 (actually 16 last I checked) is safer because so many known vulnerabilities have been closed. Virus toolkits have exploits ready to go for old versions of Flash, and exploits for newer versions are rarer.

Agreed.

Noscript seems to cure this particular site.

I've taken increasingly to brutalizing sites' CSS to fix numerous annoyances, including various fixed elements, anything social, anything advertising, anything teaser / promotional / nag, anything intersticial or modal or flyover or scroll-triggered.

It's quite refreshing.

I used to use noscript as well, but I recently have dropped it in favor of µBlock [0] which has rapidly been gaining functionality. µBlock in a "default deny" [1] configuration can provide the functionality of both noscript and an adblocker in an (IMO) much more effective UI for selective unblocking.

[0] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-de...

They're incentivized to do this by ad networks. Auto-play means the auto-playing of ads, thus money in their pocket. They know its annoying and user-hostile, but those extra ad impression revenue is worth it somehow.

I have click-to-play in Chrome set for Flash. I think its a nice middle ground between ad blocking and just accepting everything the web throws at you. HTML5 video autostart is also a problem and disabling that should be an easy to find option in browsers once that becomes the norm for ads.

I disabled Flash in Chrome. That seemed to do the trick for me.

Browsers have the "click to play plgugins" option.

Can we have just have "click to play" with sub the option "click to unmute" for everything?

For me at least, Facebook autoplays are muted.

Only if you click on the video does the sound start. It seems like a good compromise to me.

Video is very eye-catching. No advertiser wants to give that up.

Unwanted sound on the other hand, is just annoying.

Why do the advertisers' opinions matter? It's my computer, on my desk, in my house, and I'm paying for its bandwidth and electricity.

Well, because the advertisers' wrote the code that's running in your browser, and I imagine that they will do whatever maximizes their profit.

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