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Facebook's Auto-Play Videos Chew Up Expensive Data Plans
Another good reason to be annoyed by autoplaying videos online: it eats up dataplan allowances, making for some rude surprises. I'm always nervous about data allowances, and sites should be cautious about what they shove at you; turning off the autoplay feature isn't hard (and it's explained in the second article linked above), but I sure wish it was the default setting, or at least caught and handled by a browser extension. (Perhaps this is a job for Social Fixer's next iteration.) Is Facebook the worst offender on this front?
Haven't we seen this news a few days ago already?
...with auto-dupes of last week's stories
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
If I wanted to see reruns, I would be watching TV.
I almost want to blame it in Bush
Didn't I read about this days ago?
F.B. Purity is available as an addon or GreaseMonkey script and already has the option to disable autoplay, among other things.
I'm not a big sports fan, and at this point the autoplay feature on pretty much every sports site has made me effectively even less of a sports fan since in the infrequent chance a sports news headline interests me I won't bother clicking on it unless it's from a non-sports site.
Some news sites have started to pick up on it, with auto-play videos accompanying articles, to which I have to wonder why they haven't fired the writers if the articles are so worthless or redundant.
it kicks the snot out of the loadtime for the rest of the page as it seems to want to buffer the entire fucking stream first, I tend to go find myself another source. If slashdot ever decided to pull this shit, I'd go find a privately hosted nerd site. Or build my own. With blackjack and hookers.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
...the app. Only the website.
worldmobilenet.com -- World Prepaid Wireless Internet plans
The BBC this week reported that there have been in excess of 2.4 million ice bucket-related videos posted on Facebook, and 28 million people have uploaded, commented on or 'liked' ice bucket-related posts.
Really?
It's not a problem for me, I use Opera 12, i need to click to activate plug-ins before they even get downloaded from the site!
I've been so pissed off every since they implemented this.. I won't even open facebook on my iphone unless I'm connected to Wi-Fi somewhere. I can't believe there isn't a preference setting somewhere to turn off this irritating behavior.
Facebook slurps up all your personal information and sells it to advertisers. It also slurps up all your friends' and family members' information - even if they aren't on Facebook themselves - keeps it in so-called "shadow profiles", and sells that to advertisers as well. Facebook also routinely changes its privacy controls without notice, and the new versions of the controls default to the most permissive settings - so you have to continually monitor them to "minimize" (in quotes because it's still a lot) how much of your personally identifiable information leaks out to the world at large. And they occasionally make policy changes that force you to share stuff that you'd previously tried to keep confined to within a small group.
And what you're worried about is they might use more of your data plan?
#DeleteChrome
Autoplay, shmautoplay... I'd be thrilled to figure out how to access /. without the auto-refresh crap. I am fine -- more than fine, in fact -- clicking on the page refresh icon myself thank you very much.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I've been using Flashblock for years. who hasn't?
Use Adblock Plus or something to add a filter like this: a.fsdn.com/sd/autorefresh-query.js?*
No more autorefresh.
None of the videos that I see on my news feed play automatically. I need to tap the thumbnail for the video to play. I am using the Facebook app for Android. Go figure.
I paid Slashdot $5 or $10 a few years ago, and have't seen an ad since.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Yes, Facebook is so terrible with their rude auto-playing videos. Meanwhile there are three advertisement videos started automatically on the front page of Slashdot. Pot meet kettle.
Did I forget to upgrade or something? this does not work for me at all.
When did they introduce this feature into Links anyways?
Back when I first started using Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox years back, one of its best features was its extensibility. It was easy to install and write addons that could drastically improve the browsing experience.
These addons were almost always adding useful functionality. Firebug is a great example of this, where it makes Firefox much more useful for web developers. I'd also installed other addons that added new functionality to Firefox, like the ability to take screenshots of entire web pages.
These days, though, more and more of the addons I'm installing aren't to add useful functionality to Firefox, but just to fix really fucking stupid design decisions made by hipsters. The UI of Firefox, starting with Firefox 4, has continually gotten worse and worse. Now I have to install a handful of addons to undo these idiotic UI changes. It got even worse when Australis was forced upon us.
Thankfully I don't use Facebook, but if I did, this would be yet another addon I'd have to install that doesn't really improve the browsing experience, it just helps avoid stupidity forced upon us by some hipster designers over at Facebook.
Something is seriously wrong when I have 2 or 3 addons that add useful custom functionality to Firefox, but then another 10+ addons that just fix asinine UI changes made by the Firefox devs, or that block asinine website functionality like auto-playing videos. Seriously, these hipster designers need to go. Everything they touch ends up much worse off.
It's not like Facebook is in cahoots with content providers....
Who uses Facebook?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I got a new data plan 21 months ago. It was enough to receive my news, software updates, LOL-cats photos and sometimes, 100MB of porn every week. If I did that now, my weekly allowance would last 5 days. Software, photos and web-pages in general have gotten much bigger. I use a video down-loader to avoid wasting my download allowance on repeated video streaming. So I dislike auto-play videos.
almost every article has a video now. it's worse because the volume isn't set to mute and you can't pause the video till it has started playing.
What do you expect?
"All the cool hip kids got out of college in the middle of the last decade and got employed at all these places. (Microsoft included)
Instead of nice, useful, usable interfaces with the ability to have advanced toolbars enabled for various types of work, we got shit like Ribbon and a triple-bad menu with everything behind it. And because of silly over-optimizations by optimization freaks, the menu isn't even always loaded and can get unloaded to save memory, so when you open the menu, it can lag a little with heavy drive IO, or even an intense-ish program. AWFUL.
Instead of nice, customizable interfaces, we get same-crap forced on us because browser vendors think alienating people,- that surprise me with the ability to be able to even breathe - is a bad thing.
No depth now, all bright solid colors and minimal border use. Gotta have curves everywhere as well, because screw efficient layouts.
"But you have a good computer, why not use those specs to their best ability?"
IT'S A FUCKING BROWSER, THAT IS WHY.
The same shit excuse was used for that god-awful Windows Vista interface with its GPU acceleration. NO, get LOST.
I HATE software now. It is getting worse by the year. Why the hell do people exist? Why can't we just nuke ourselves already? Hurry up Putin, you coward, I don't want to live in this world where even more awful "artists" get their hands on more software and ruin it.
I work for a portal company; if you have one of the major ISPs in the United States, you (well, actually, your non-tech-savvy family members) probably use our services in one way or another. We've been pushing out tablet and phone versions of the portals and we have been forced to add auto-play videos. One of our marketing people was shocked - shocked I say - when he asked me what I thought of our current phone portal and my response was, "I'm glad I have flash blocked and ads blocked." I went on to tell him that I generally don't mind ads if they're not obnoxious, but auto-play videos and all that crap are not only an extremely poor user experience but they also waste tons of bandwidth that I, quite frankly, cannot (and will not) afford on my data plan.
It isn't that us software folks don't tell our marketing folks this stuff. We do. Constantly. We HATE it when we have to add more tracking code and video advertisements and other crap like that, but unfortunately too many companies see only short term dollar signs. They are "Short Term Greedy" instead of "Long Term Greedy" and they will, eventually, be badly hurt because of this.
Mobile Browsers who when you click on them start to download all over again the last page you visited the day before. This page is in 99% of the cases not interesting for me. But the instant reload gobbles up my data plan. Chrome I'm looking at you!
Bingo! I did that a year or two ago. It does have the side-effect of breaking a couple of other minor things, but whatever they were they are so trivial that I don't even remember them anymore.
Of course there is always http://soylentnews.org/ instead...
This ^^^^^
I mean at least let me play wack-a-mole and hit the pause button as soon as the page loads so I can ignore this auto play rubbish.
There is a solution that beats all others - goto webkit.org download code, build a new browser that doesn't support the <video> tag - HEAVEN.
Don't get me wrong.... I hate video autoplay.
But I feel that things like this will ultimately result on pressure on carriers to correct the real problem: The dataplan allowances are way too low, AND 1 Gigabyte of data is priced way too high.
So by having autoplay..... ordinary folks will be using more data, BUT they're not going to want to pay a lot, so there is going to be pressure on carriers to increase data allowances
Perhaps they might be able to give you a hand with your punctuation.
If you're logged into Facebook, this link should take you straight to the settings page where you can disable the auto-playing of videos:
https://www.facebook.com/setti...
This should work for most people - although my brother (on Mac OS X) was not able to see the 'Videos' sub-menu (which for me appears in the list on the left at the very bottom).
I only use the FB website on my mobile (the constant addition of new permissions turned me off the app), and am not sure if you can disable it within the app.
The autoplay feature is very annoying! Here's to hoping that Facebook gets its collective head out of its ass and rectifies the situation.
I got in trouble at work because of this feature. I had facebook open in a tab, and I didn't notice that it was autoloading videos in the background. My job doesn't care if I do some personal browsing during the day, but we have bandwidth limits... I was way, way, way over the limit. Lesson learned.
I cannot understand the logic in autoplaying videos when the application itself can detect whether it's using wireless network or on data.
Obviously we don't want to be downloading a video that we're not interested in watching over data!! This is a simple thing out of respect that the developers should be considering. I will now use Facebook less when I'm on data in future, because of this.
browsers can't detect the difference between an animated GIF and non-animated until it starts downloading
Other than that if it's not animated, there will likely be a Content-type: image/png HTTP header. Almost nobody uses still GIF anymore. Those not convinced to switch to PNG a decade ago by Unisys's assertion of its LZW patent were convinced by PNG's smaller file sizes on the vast majority of images and practical high-color support.
But the mobile app will still autoplay if it detects it's on wifi instead of cell data network.
Which would hurt the owner of a Wi-Fi AP with a satellite or cellular uplink. Or does the Facebook respect the operating system's provision to mark an SSID as being metered? (In Android 4.4 "KitKat", it's Settings > Data usage > overflow > Mobile hotspots. There's also a feature for this in Windows 8.)
you know you could just, i dont know... turn it off on the facebook app settings...
or switch it to WIFI only mode..
As others have pointed out, no need for a browser extension to handle this because it's a simple setting. As the developer of Social Fixer, I did post info to users about how to turn this off months ago: https://www.facebook.com/socialfixer/photos/a.382610684341.167165.174424289341/10152145424839342/
Unfortunately, the setting doesn't persist across devices/apps. So setting it on the web won't help mobile anyway. Supposedly auto-play videos were only ever supposed to auto-play if the user was on wi-fi, but I don't think that's actually how it works.
Most of Facebook's decisions and actions are remarkably anti-user. As in, not in the users' best interests, but in the interests of the advertisers, publishers, share holders, and people with the last name Zuckerberg. I often wonder why we all continue to fund this site through content and ad views. It seems like an abusive relationship, but we just won't leave!
[ ps, thanks for the direct link to the Social Fixer site! It won't help with this specific issue, but it will help with many others. :) ]
"Why shouldn't I wish death on myself and others over curves in my browser?"
IT'S A FUCKING BROWSER, THAT IS WHY.
Android does the same thing. I don't see you guys crying about that on every Android article.
...These days, though, more and more of the addons I'm installing aren't to add useful functionality to Firefox, but just to fix really fucking stupid design decisions made by hipsters. The UI of Firefox, starting with Firefox 4, has continually gotten worse and worse. Now I have to install a handful of addons to undo these idiotic UI changes. It got even worse when Australis was forced upon us....
In my experience, the QA process for those add-ons is not nearly as good as the QA process for the FireFox browser. As a result, the functionality reclaimed by using those add-ons is usually problematic, at best.
The bug-fest called Classic Browser theme, or something like that, which reinstates the functional UI that Australis removed, is what convinced me to leave Firefox in the dust and start using Pale Moon as my browser of choice.
My daughter went over her 2GB limit for the first time ever, and AT&T automatically charged her an extra $15 for another gig. If that happens to 10 million users, AT&T pulls in another $150million which pads the bottom line very nicely as we approach the end of the 3rd quarter. At the same time, Facebook's servers used up a bit more bandwidth which may have cost them some money, but let's imagine that Facebook charges it's advertisers as a fixed percentage of the total bandwidth. I don't know that it actually works that way, but anyone who works in a big corporation will tell you there are frequently twisted metrics like this, so it's not impossible they somehow made money.
Which leads me to the idea it may not have been an unintentional glitch. Conspiracy theorists unite!