Google Says Chrome Blocks 'About Half' of Unwanted Autoplays (venturebeat.com) 102
When Google released Chrome 66 just over two weeks ago, it received lots of attention and praise for introducing the ability to mute autoplaying videos with sound until you press play. Today, Chrome product manager John Pallett revealed that "the new policy blocks about half of unwanted autoplays." VentureBeat reports: Pallett also shared that "a significant number" of autoplays are paused, muted, or have their tab closed within six seconds by Chrome users. He didn't say how many exactly, as the number varies significantly from site to site. But that shouldn't surprise anyone, given how much work Google put into this latest feature. Chrome decides which autoplaying content to stop in its tracks by learning your preferences and ranking each website according to your past behavior. If you don't have browsing history with a site, Chrome allows autoplay for over 1,000 sites where Google says the highest percentage of visitors play media with sound (sites where media is the main point of visiting the site). As you browse the web, Chrome updates that list by enabling autoplay on sites where you play media with sound during most of your visits, and disables it on sites where you don't.
While this is a good feature... (Score:5, Interesting)
Mostly true (Score:3)
Most of what you've said is true, but you missed what has made Google not only by far the largest marketing company in history, but one of the world's largest and most successful companies. You've missed what they have that nobody else does, their number one most valuable asset.
What marketing data companies used to do, and most still do, is collect information about leads and sell their lists to each other. Company A would sell their list to Company B. Company B would combine that with some of their own da
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Is AdWords even a thing anymore? I don't think I've seen one of those in a LONG time.
You have to remember Google is more than AdWords. AdWords is probably a tiny part of their business, given they bought out the big ad networks like DoubleClick, AdMob and many others a long time ago. Enough so that all those flashy pop-up ads that annoy you on relatively legitim
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Imagine the reputation hit that would ensue should Alphabet/Google get known for bringing about a massive malware attack because someone snuck something through.
Perhaps you might argue the meaning of "massive" but it has [malwarebytes.com] already [fox-it.com] happened [sucuri.net] and there was almost no reputation hit.
Re:While this is a good feature... (Score:5, Insightful)
While this is a good feature I don't trust Google's motives. hey have done this to drive more business toward AdWords, that would never get blocked.
AdWords, the internet's least offensive form of advertising. Sometimes the motives of a for profit organisation actually align just fine with the desires of users.
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Pale Moon. So potentially Firefox too.
Autoplay isn't disabled by default, but it's trivial to toggle.
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I still get stuff that autoplays on Pale Moon.
If only there was a control, on the video, that allowed you to start and stop the video playing when YOU want it to. . .
Who wants autoplay, anywhere, ever? (Score:5, Insightful)
Autoplay video like the "mind-blowingly inconsiderate, rude, and completely unaware co-worker" of the web. There has literally never, ever been an instance where some video started playing and I was all like "Oh, wow, I am so fucking grateful I didn't have to click a button to make that happen." There are dozens of instances per day where I'm clicking to make it stop (well, before some of the browsers started clamping down).
Autoplay is just obnoxious and rude. Sites that use it are obnoxious and rude. People who develop and implement it are obnoxious and rude. Fuck them all in the ass with a nuclear weapon.
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I prefer this method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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I prefer this method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
CAUTION Autoplaying video in that link!
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Not me. I turned off with media.autoplay.enabled in my SeaMonkey's about:config. ;)
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Fuck them all in the ass with a nuclear weapon.
Dipped in Ghost Pepper Sauce and lubed with ground glass and razorwire. . . .
When not on Youtube most videos are unwanted (Score:4, Insightful)
You just got muted (Score:1)
If your video autoplays, your site is now muted. Permanently.
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None, I imagine. It's a built in function of Chrome.
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None, I imagine. It's a built in function of Chrome.
Indeed: chrome://settings/content/sound [chrome] If you want to go all-in (not currently per-site), you can hit chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy [chrome]
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I'd actually prefer if Youtube didn't autoplay. That may be the reason I'm visiting the page, but I honestly sometimes just want to see the comments first or queue it up before either showing someone else or plugging into a TV
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vimeo.com? pornhub.com? redtube.com?
There's quite a few websites where the primary purpose is to play videos.
Re:About half? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't give a shit if that's the primary purpose, do not autoplay videos.
When I have 19 youtube pages open at the same time it's kind of important that at least 18 of them are not actually sending signals to my sound card. It's merely sensible that they're also not using system resources processing complex mathematics to the benefit of nobody.
Vimeo, DailyMotion, Twitch.. they can all wait patiently until I'm ready to view their content and explicitly indicate this through interaction with an appropriate control on their web page.
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I concur 100%. We've had playlists for decades now. That's how you know someone wants your shit to auto-play. If it's not in a playlist? It should not play until "play" is clicked.
This is not fucking rocket science.
I use uBlock to kill video players on websites that autoplay. In general, that means if a website auto-plays, I will likely never watch a video on their site again. I'm going to block them all, and I'm unlikely to be tempted to disable uBlock to see their shit.
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you do realize autoplay exists and proliferates for the similar reason that e-mail spam does? because, much to our chagrin, pages with autoplay DO perform better than those without!
I hate autoplay probably as much as almost everyone on Slashdot, and close almost instantly every page that does it. but as long as majority of visitors sticks around longer, click on ads etc. with autoplay, as long as that behavior stays prevalent, it's going to only get worse.
Hey Google! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Point your browser at the Chicken Noodle Network (cnn.com). They not only have an autoplay video, they make the damned thing follow you down as you read the page. Please block that.
Just about every newspaper's website that isn't the BBC in the UK does the same thing. FFS, Get Reading does it and Reading is a town of 160,000 people. Annoying as fuck. So much so that most sites I don't bother to visit any more.
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I wasn't able to reliably kill that with uBlock, so I just stopped going to CNN. Apparently the number of people who put up with that shit dwarfs the number of us who don't.
That is not "blocking" autoplay (Score:5, Insightful)
>"Google Says Chrome Blocks 'About Half' of Unwanted Autoplays""
Sorry, but simply muting is not "blocking" autoplaying videos. If the video is playing, it is still using bandwidth, using CPU, using power, and is visually extremely annoying.
Fail.
Let us know you when you *actually* block autoplay and when you can do it more like 80+% of the time, like I can do in Firefox right now with the "Disable HTML5 Autoplay" addon.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... [mozilla.org]
Far from perfect, but much better (IMHO) than what Chrome does.
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There's lots of Chrome extensions that turn off html5 autoplay too.
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If only Chrome extensions worked on mobile.... You know, the place where you most care of some greedy, slimy, site is abusing your very limited and very expensive bandwidth.
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I have autoplay blocked on Chrome for Android.
I never set it, so I assume it's the default.
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autoplay blocked? or just muted? muted still takes the same amount of bandwidth as if it were playing at full volume.
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Blocked. There is an option to enable autoplay for muted videos.
Chrome 66 for Android
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I'm on Chrome 66 for Android and I see autoplay videos (muted) many times every day on a variety of different sites. If there's a way to prevent it I'm all ears! (On my laptop I have an extension that prevents it, but no such luck on my phone)
Re:That is not "blocking" autoplay (Score:4, Informative)
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Yes, I use Firefox Mobile for this exact reason. It's a shame though, because Firefox Mobile is absolute, unmitigated garbage compared with Chrome or even that Samsung browser thing on Android.
It will leave my phone hot too the touch on heavier websites that Chrome will barely break a sweat on. And text entry... my god is that broken. To the point where many sites, touching where in the text box you want your cursor causes it to be placed in a completely different spot, or the whole page to scroll away. The
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Would you prefer that websites fall back from muted autoplaying WebM to muted autoplaying GIF animation, which requires a higher bitrate than WebM?
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I would prefer that Browsers treated the owner of the computer as being in charge, rather than the idiot web "designer".
Let users decide if they want to waste all their bandwidth downloading video.
Years ago when connections were slower, all major browsers gave you the option whether or not to load images from websites automatically. Now obviously that's not what people are clamoring for now, but video is the new image, and the choice as to whether or not to download them should rest with the person paying f
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Let users decide if they want to waste all their bandwidth downloading video.
With the numerous ways to animate something in the web platform, good luck detecting "video" before it's downloaded.
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I disagree, If you can't tell if it's video or not, you also wouldn't be able to play it. The fact that you can play it means you know what it is, and can also block it.
Browser coders aren't as completely incompetent as you make them out to be.
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If you can't tell if it's video or not, you also wouldn't be able to play it
JavaScript code downloads a file, runs an algorithm on its bytes [github.com], and updates the pixel content of a <canvas> element. Is that video? How would a browser be able to tell?
JavaScript code downloads a bunch of JPEG or PNG images and displays them in sequence on an <img> element. Is that video? How would a browser be able to tell?
An element has a JPEG background image whose position within its container is advanced by steps using a CSS animation [pineight.com]. Is that video? How would a browser be able to tell?
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Well to start with it's not nearly as complicated as you make it out to be because nobody is trying to use such sneaky tactics, but beyond that, it's still easy, does the image change on a frequent basis with no user input? then it's a video. Done.
You are WAY over complicating matters. This isn't rocket science, there are dozens of extensions that are able to accomplish this feat with near 100% success, there's no reason why it can't also be done on a mobile phone.
Re: That is not "blocking" autoplay (Score:1)
Then we block *.gif.
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When you've blocked muted autoplaying WebM or GIF, would you prefer that websites fall back to a sequence of JPEG or PNG images rotated by script? Or storing frames in a JPEG and using CSS animation to cycle among them?
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I'm using firefox with uMatrix and I haven't seen an autoplay video in years.
One time I thought it was broken but I'd accidentally clicked the youtube slider.
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Sorry, but simply muting is not "blocking" autoplaying videos. If the video is playing, it is still using bandwidth, using CPU, using power, and is visually extremely annoying.
Fail.
You don't understand how the feature works. Autoplaying videos ARE blocked if they contain sound. Muted autoplay is still allowed. Additionally autoplay is allowed if you bookmarked the site or interact with the site regularly and you can control that with the mute option. e.g. if you tick mute on the domain level then video autoplay is blocked for any video that doesn't have sound.
The entire purpose of this is to kill off background sound in tabs. I.e. you open a link in the background, if it has sound it
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The few things you mention slip through on some unobnoxious videos, and are mild compared to the effect of having audio suddenly playing.
It's not "mild" when you get the data use overage bill at the end of the month.
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>"Autoplaying videos ARE blocked if they contain sound. Muted autoplay is still allowed."
Then that is not "blocking autoplay" it is "blocking some autoplay", which to me, is nowhere good enough.
The video is just as annoying to me as the audio, especially when it "follows me down the page" all the time while I am trying to read something. I don't want the web to be turned into TV, or even muted TV.
Good luck blocking this MJPEG in CSS (Score:2)
Let us know you when you *actually* block autoplay and when you can do it more like 80+% of the time, like I can do in Firefox right now with the "Disable HTML5 Autoplay" addon.
Does your autoplay blocker also block motion JPEG implemented in pure CSS [pineight.com]?
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>Does your autoplay blocker also block motion JPEG implemented in pure CSS?
Unfortunately, no. I have to manually use "Nuke Anything" to stop it.
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Let us know you when you *actually* block autoplay and when you can do it more like 80+% of the time, like I can do in Firefox right now with the "Disable HTML5 Autoplay" addon.
You may not need that plug-in anymore. Firefox also has built-in autoplay blocking, and has had it for quite a number of versions now. It is however still an experimental, hidden feature. It can be turned on in about:config by toggling "media.autoplay.enabled" to false.
I forget exactly when I found that setting and started using it, but it's been years now. While it's not perfect, and getting videos that you WANT to see to actually play can occasionally be a little finicky (Twitter takes a few clicks
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>"You may not need that plug-in anymore. Firefox also has built-in autoplay blocking, and has had it for quite a number of versions now. It is however still an experimental, hidden feature. It can be turned on in about:config by toggling "media.autoplay.enabled" to false."
I am aware of their feature tried it for years, and it is, unfortunately, quite broken. There are lots of bug reports on it. Many sites can't be made to play video at all with it set to false. The add-on I mentioned works much better
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Last I checked, Firefox was looking at changing to what Chrome does, which will make it even WORSE, because it is not about muting audio, it is about not having autoplaying anything.
You mean what Chrome does with chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy [chrome]? Or the "Media Interaction" voodoo that TFA talks about?
If it's autoplay (Score:2)
it's unwanted (keep up Google).
So in other words (Score:5, Funny)
Chrome is now about half as useful as the average adblocker.
So many things you'd need to block (Score:2)
Block autoplaying muted video, and sites will fall back to autoplay methods that use even more CPU or bandwidth: animated GIF, FFmpeg's VP8 decoder compiled to asm.js or WebAssembly and rendering to a <canvas>, scripted JPEG/PNG rotation, or even pure CSS JPEG/PNG rotation.
what about all? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just block them all!
Then you will have a 100% success rate, and when you actually want it to play, just press the play button, it's doesn't require much effort.
Comment removed (Score:3)
This horse got past media.autoplay.enabled (Score:3)
In Firefox ESR 52, currently the default in Debian 9 "Stretch", this galloping horse [pineight.com] got past media.autoplay.enabled = false. Does current Firefox add CSS animation blocking?
I'll press play if I want to see it. (Score:2)
I cannot imagine when any user would want auto-playing video and sound on a web site. I use Chrome and I have not noticed any decline in the number of these irritating auto-playing and pop-up videos. I particularly hate the news sites where the video will pop up on the right hand side of the screen if you stop it at the top of the page -- and no close button is provided in the pop-up window.
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Say you're playing a web-based video game. Every time something happens in the game, a sound effect plays. Do you want to have to click play 20 times for 20 sound effects?
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Yes, that would be great. Then I could just add that specific site to a whitelist. Much better hit rate that way than the 50/50 Google has apparently achieved.
Why only half? (Score:3)
Google, are you stupid, or just crooks? (Score:2)