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PSA: Google Chrome Now Lets You Permanently Mute Websites That Autoplay Videos (independent.co.uk)

Posted by BeauHD on from the sanity-saving-features dept.

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.

15 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. Autoplay whitelist by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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).

    1. Re:Autoplay whitelist by flopsquad · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Agreed. This solution is nice if there's a few websites that you visit regularly that are so afflicted

      And this story pops up right next to one about CNN...

      Fuck autoplay video at the top of every page, and double fuck turning it into a tiny sidebar video and restarting it after you scroll past it.

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      Nothing posted to /. has ever been legal advice, including this.
    2. Re:Autoplay whitelist by dwillden · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This! Just muting the sounds is nice, but it still streams the data downloading the entire video file. Autoplay is evil and needs to be Opt in only. I might want it on YouTube or a similar site. I don't want it on every single news site and blog out there.

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      I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
  2. Mute? by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    1. Re:Mute? by markdavis · · Score: 4, Insightful

      >How about not loading the videos, period?

      +100

      Muting videos is nowhere near enough... it is a great start, but not a finish. Many people want that NO videos should ever play unless the user specifically requests it by clicking on something. THAT should be a user choice. Muted videos still chew through bandwidth and CPU and batteries. But most importantly, they are extremely annoying and distracting. And many sites now even force the damn things to FOLLOW the user while they are trying to read an article!

    2. Re:Mute? by h4ck7h3p14n37 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The cynic in me says that Google is taking money from someone to leave autoplay enabled. Whomever at W3C dreamt that "feature" up should be tarred and feathered.

    3. Re:Mute? by Koby77 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Similar to muting sound from a tab, there ought to be a button to cutoff the tab from consuming any more bandwidth. This would shut down unwanted videos, gifs, advertisements, and other undesirable content from loading.

    4. Re:Mute? by markdavis · · Score: 3, Informative

      >"The cynic in me says that Google is taking money from someone to leave autoplay enabled."

      Agreed. It does make you wonder....

      Now, keep in mind that disabling autoplay completely is actually pretty tricky. Firefox has been working on it, but it keeps breaking certain sites or having unintended actions. The muting part is easy. But we need a REAL fix that gives users full control.

      Searching, I found these:

      https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...
      https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...

  3. Click-to-run by Luthair · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why not treat video like a plugin and let users white list sites we will allow video to run at all on.

    1. Re:Click-to-run by markdavis · · Score: 3, Interesting

      >"Because then advertisers would fall back to using hacks and gifs rather than video."

      And then you disallow animated GIF and PNG (like Firefox allows with user control) and then endlessly running scripts. Yes, it is a war, but one that needs to be fought.

  4. I'd prefer to be able to temporarily unmute by dmomo · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  5. GIF would be even worse by tepples · · Score: 4, Informative

    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:

    Disabling autoplay had the unintended effect of driving developers to alternatives such as animated GIFs, as well as <canvas> and <img> hacks. These techniques are much worse than optimized video in terms of power consumption, performance, bandwidth requirements, data cost and memory usage. Video can provide higher quality than animated GIFs, with far better compression: around 10 times on average, and up to 100 times at best. Video decoding in JavaScript is possible, but it's a huge drain on battery power.

    1. Re:GIF would be even worse by markdavis · · Score: 4, Insightful

      >"Google's rationale behind allowing muted autoplaying video [google.com] 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:"

      Which is why browsers like Firefox ALSO allow the user to disable playback of animated GIFs. Perhaps that should be an option in Chrome....

  6. Big Feature! by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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    1. Re:Big Feature! by markdavis · · Score: 3, Informative

      >"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."

      Bingo. It is not like ANY USER really wants to autoplay ANY video- muted or not. As if a single click on "play" or on the video container is too much effort. The only reason for autoplay existing is for web sites to further shove annoying S*** down the throats of the users. It is a huge step backwards.