Slashdot Mirror
PSA: Google Chrome Now Lets You Permanently Mute Websites That Autoplay Videos (independent.co.uk)
Google is releasing a new version of Chrome this week and it includes a number of new features, such as an improved ad blocker and Spectre mitigations. The best new feature in Chrome 64 is the ability to permanently mute websites that autoplay videos. This feature was teased for several months, but now it's finally here. The Independent reports: To mute a site that automatically plays videos, users will need click the View Site Information symbol, which may look like a green padlock, on the left-hand edge of the omnibar -- the address bar combined with the Google search box. Then they will need to select Sound. Once the website is muted, it will not automatically play videos with sound again until you unmute it.
How about Google disable autoplay by default and allow us to whitelist sites that we want to allow autoplay on? Give control back to the users. Oh right, users are the product, and Google is focused on their customers (advertisers).
How about not loading the videos, period? Why waste my bandwidth for something I don't want to see in the first place?
Videos should be like Flash: click to play.
#DeleteFacebook
Why not treat video like a plugin and let users white list sites we will allow video to run at all on.
I'll switch from Galleon.
Better would be to just not allow a video to be played at all unless it is visible in the currently shown tab and window. If it is scrolled either above the window or below it, or if it is not in the current tab at all, then the video should be paused, not just muted.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Right click on the tab and select "Mute Site", the instructions posted seem so complicated.
I tried this out on CNN. It works, but if I want to hear a video, I have to choose "always allow this site to play audio". It's a bit too fidgety for my liking, but better than nothing.
... Firefox had months ago with a simple lightweight plugin. Good job Google!
Google's rationale behind allowing muted autoplaying video is that if the video fails to load, playback is likely to fall back to a GIF animation, which uses your bandwidth even less efficiently:
I use FF with an extension to mute all tabs. Only on demand it will unmute. Until this simple interface is implemented, Chrome is out for me.
Switch away from the Spotify, Pandora, Amazon, SoundCloud, or YouTube tab playing music, and it gets paused. How would that benefit users? YouTube on mobile already has that "feature" to pause when visibility is lost and puts the disable switch behind a recurring paywall.
Another strong step forward in making sure that a user is in control of their web browser.
However this does not go far enough. Ublock origin and the like NEED to be included as a baked in part of browsers.
We need the ability to remember a URL and block dom elements on that URL.
We need the ability to block sources of malware/spam/ads from their script url.
While many people advocate for the usage of hosts this is a poor answer as hosts is regularly ignored by several parts of popular operating systems. Hosts does ensure that non-browser related content is also blocked to particular URLS. For linux domain blocker is very similar to hosts and preferred in however it does not have a good user interface.
All of us follow certain common habits, if we get a windows machine we use IE to download chrome/firefox then leave IE to collect dust. In a similar sense as soon as we get chrome or firefox we immediately go and get blocking ad ons/extensions.
It would make sense if they just baked this blocking and selective blocking ability directly into all browsers as a default. I'm pretty sure even the people who make these browsers act just like the rest of us and first thing they do is go out and get blocking ad ons/extentions. So why not just skip the middle step?
The situation at present reminds me of how media players used to be, you could get a media player but then you'd have to scrounge for codecs on the web. You always had to go and find the codecs so the player would work the way you wanted, in a similar sense we go find blockers because then the browser works the way we want it to.
But I run NoScript so none of that nonsense affects me.
Have a nice day.
I can see why that feature needed a several month cycle to get into Chrome. I mean, can you imagine the difficulty of implementing and testing that feature.
Of course, not autoplaying video was a rule for like 20 years, and had the added benefit of loading faster, less bandwidth, and just as many clicks to watch the video.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
to directly prevent loading of the video just go to about:config and set at the appropriate value the self-explaining boolean media.autoplay.enabled or media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground
They really need to add a dupe detection feature: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/01/25/1717226/chrome-64-released-with-stronger-popup-blocker-spectre-mitigations
Seriously, it's the exact same event, just with a different title. Where do I submit my application to get paid to read Slashdot all day?
Will it stop Youtube videos from autoplaying? I tend to have a bunch of tabs open at once and if I have to restart my browser (say, for an update...) its a horrid cacophony until I either wait them all out or manually switch to each video and pause it. Somewhere around 3/4 of the addons I use are there specifically to stop Youtube from being so obnoxiously in your face (and the other 1/4 are mostly to stop other videos/scripts/bullshit from auto-running as much as possible.)
I suggested another solution a year and a half ago in a comment to someone's anti-adblock blog. Give each page load a data cap configurable per domain and defaulting to 1,000,000 bytes. Once a particular page load has reached the quota, pause all connections and display a "runaway download" notice similar to that for an unresponsive script. The user can reset the cap by clicking "Load More" in the notice or by navigating to another document.
I now realize that this naive model of a cap per document would break single-page web applications, which replace parts of a document instead of navigating. For these, the browser should let the user define a quota per hour, minute, or user gesture.
I would not have known about this awesome feature if they didn't post it here. When they update like this there should be a popup change log tab.
There must be an easier way to not hear videos which autoplay. Something like a mute option which could be easily accessed from the desktop.
Perhaps, and I'm just spitballing here, maybe if one's speakers could somehow be turned off so no sound could emanate from them. It would be up to the discretion of the user to turn the speakers on when they wanted.
*sigh* I guess we'll have to deal with this complexity since there isn't a simpler method to not hear audio.
then maybe it won't be terrible here... amiright?
Your suggestion to use an OS-level or hardware-level mute feature may work for some people. But it won't work for people who want to hear sound from one app but not from another app, or sound from a document open in one tab but not from a document open in another tab.
I find that is 100% effective in not hearing things I don't want to hear.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
We need to take a page from the playbook dealing with stuff like flash. Disable it all unless the user explicitly clicks on it to consume that content.
I am definitely looking at sites like some of the major news sites where they auto load a video and the damn thing follows you down the page as you scroll to read. If i wanted to watch my damn news i'll look up your news site on youtube or tune into your cable network, otherwise let me read in peace.
The damn things slow the page loading, hurt the performance of older machines. JUST STOP IT ALREADY!
Click the speaker icon on the website's tab. Enjoy everything muted. Seems like Google is turning into Apple.
I am willing to buy a premium or upgraded or platinum edition or whatever the name the marketing comes up with. It should give me better control over video feed. No video, no animated gif, no auto play anything, do not allow the video to relocate itself to defeat scrolling past it...
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I think Anonymous Coward #56004133's point is that just setting image.animation_mode to once would not stop animation driven by CSS or JavaScript that arranges the frames of an animation as CSS sprites.
Motion JPEG in JavaScript Arrange the frames as a filmstrip. Then add a script that uses setInterval or requestAnimationFrame to periodically change the background-position of an element that displays a sprited JPEG as its background. Motion JPEG in pure CSS Arrange the frames as a filmstrip, and use a keyframe set and stepped progression to animate the background-position property as described in "CSS Sprite Sheet Animations with steps()" by Guil Hernandez. Try it: Muybridge's galloping horse.it's like the whole place is run by retards. GIVE ME A UNIVERSAL FUCKING "AUTOPLAY = OFF" setting ffs.
so sick of there not being any useful settings
fuck the mute, I want the ability to NOT auto play video content full stop, that includes videos on news sites and fucking Ads
Call me when the annoying popup asking if you want to join their email list goes away.
Why not just open news (or whatever) sites in a new tab, mute the tab (context menu on the tab -> mute tab), then view when ready? Videos don't start playing in a tab until it's activated, so you don't run the risk of hearing anything until you first give focus to the tab, offering plenty of time to mute it. You can always just unmute the tab if you want to hear a specific video (you can also stop/mute any other unwanted videos on the site before you unmute the tab at your leisure).
Really, this approach has worked really well for me, and it's very fine grained, which is something that this new feature doesn't seem to be (no need to always permit video on a site if you just want to hear one of their videos).
I mean, it doesn't sound like a bad feature or anything, just doesn't really seem that it adds all that much benefit over what was already available out of the box. Or maybe I'm just missing something.
"Is not a sentence" is not a sentence. Well damn.
I want to restore the ability to mute a TAB.
Sometimes I have multiple videos going from tge same site and it's more convenient to mute the tab(s) you want silenced as opposed to using the site's built in volume control.
Get back to us when Autoplaying videos are stopped by default.
Ah, those black holes in my browser which say "whoops! something is wrong with you!".
Sorry, no javascript here. I just won't buy your things if I can't read them.
This is a feature that I'd like but I've found I am having to revert to an older version as Google seem to be slowly crippling anything Adobe-related.
Defaulting Flash to Ask instead of Run was semi-understandable, even if the implementation didn't work and broke some sites for me, AND the documentation for changing it back to Autorun for certain sites was not presented up-front at all (Apparently I expected to be psychic to know I would have to click on the tiny (I) next to the web address to access site options which they had removed previously but apparently put back at some point, albeit still minus Site Security Certificate information!!!)
But now they've completely disabled the ability to open PDFs inside anything other than Chrome's half-baked PDF viewer!! It is now that or save - no file association options or anything to open it in another program. It's like being back in the 90's again!
And also, will this mute thing work on YouTube? That site has been the most guilty of auto-playing videos for me, and they keep breaking my no-auto-play script.
One HUGE irony of this all is when everything was Flash-based, I just disabled plugins when I didn't want to be bugged by annoying videos; Now, with HTML5, you don't have a choice!! PROGRESS!!!
Goddamn I miss the old Presto-based Opera... It was the polar opposite of this dumbed down PoS - You could customize every aspect of it, from the hotkeys, to the UI, even the menus and context menus!
Use Vivaldi.