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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?
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
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.