Chrome 54 Arrives With YouTube Flash Embed Rewriting To HTML5 (venturebeat.com)

Krystalo quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google today launched Chrome 54 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This release is mainly focused on developers, but the improvements to how the browser handles YouTube embeds is also noteworthy. You can update to the latest version now using the browser's built-in silent updater, or download it directly from google.com/chrome. Chrome 54 rewrites YouTube Flash players to use the YouTube HTML5 embed style. YouTube ditched Flash for HTML5 by default in January 2015, but the old embeds still exist all over the web. Google says the change improves both performance and security for its desktop browser. The report adds that "Chrome also now provides support for the custom elements V1 spec," which allows "developers to create custom HTML tags as well as define their API and behavior in JavaScript." BroadcastChannel API will also be implemented "to allow one-to-many messaging between windows, tabs, iframes, web workers, and service workers." You can read more about Chrome 54 on Google's blog post.

Comments

Can you turn autostart off

[Oswald McWeany]

Can you turn autostart off?

That's the one biggest factor that should be decided for any web-browser. You should be able to prevent autostart video with the native settings without add-ins or extensions.

Re:Can you turn autostart off

[slack_justyb]

I know off-topic, but you can do this in Firefox via an about:config setting called media.autoplay.enabled. Setting the value to false kills auto-play for everything.

What would be great is if website's allowed a white list for auto-play and banned everything else from auto-playing. And I mean it in the sense that "by default" or at the very least "built in", yes extensions are great but a browser packing something in indicates that they actually care about whatever it is they are packing in. Mozilla brought us pop-up blocker packed into the browser and eventually pop-ups died off because everyone hated them greatly. I would argue that video auto-play is the modern pop-up. Browsers should have "built in" methods to stop it. Browsers should indicated that they care about their users by listening to one of the biggest pain points about being on the web.

Re:Can you turn autostart off

[mrchaotica]

The answer from Mozilla folks is "telemetry has proven that our users are too fucking stupid to handle that".

How could it ever be otherwise? The smart users turn off telemetry!