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Chrome 66 Arrives With Autoplaying Content Blocked By Default (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google today launched Chrome 66 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The desktop release includes autoplaying content muted by default, security improvements, and new developer features. You can update to the latest version now using the browser's built-in silent updater or download it directly from google.com/chrome. In our tests, autoplaying content that is muted still plays automatically. Autoplaying content with sound, whether it has visible controls or not, and whether it is set to play on loop or not, simply does not start playing. Note that this is all encompassing -- even autoplaying content you are expecting or is the main focus of the page does not play. YouTube videos, for example, no longer start playing automatically. And in case that's not enough, or if a page somehow circumvents the autoplaying block, you can still mute whole websites.
So many sites playing audio and video ads nowadays. And they work more diligently than the best ad blockers at getting in your face.
I'm tired of websites wasting my bandwidth with videos I never wanted to watch in the first place.
Now can we do something about those awful video-converted-to-animated-GIF monstrosities?
#DeleteFacebook
You'd think Mozilla would have done this first.
OK, the Mozilla of a decade ago that actually cared about Firefox, and not non-technical bullcrap.
I just updated to Chrome 66. By far my biggest autoplay annoyance is CNN; they autoplay video on every story page that has video. I'm there to read, dammit, not to watch.
Unfortunately, this new feature in Chrome isn't helping, there: CNN still autoplays, with sound. I checked, and my media engagement index there is 0.02.
Guess it's time to turn the hard HTML5 media block back on.
And why not give us an option to stop autoplay on videos, whether sound is present or not?
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Why can’t we do the same with auto play, gifs, and everything else that fights for our attention?
My gueriila suggestion: just start clicking on all ads that annoy you. Make the advertisers pay. And mess up their “valuable” tracking metrics in the process.
-Chris
I had a moment of fun fitting this news into Bruce Shneier's notion of electronic feudalism. As serfs on the Google plantation, we look to Google to protect us from various raiding barbarians. We pay for this protection by allowing ourselves to be farmed by the Google ad machine.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
I always thought they were a supreme waste of bandwidth and energy overall. Hopefully it will block any of those cryptocurrency engines some websites were using.
So, like I've been doing in Firefox since forever with media.autoplay.disabled plus disabling flash shit and other oothe plugin nonsense, or makingi t click to play if there's something I really want to see for some reason?
Has anyone seriously NOT disabled autoplay on the web in recent times? Web is unusuable if you let sites do what they want any more. You have to disable all that shit plus javascript and web bugs.
Browsers should by default not play any video but allow users to whitelist sites that they're okay about autoplay - streaming services and so on. It can be done discretely such as when the user first clicks to play some content that was set to autoplay.
Instead of muting, how about blocking even the downloading of media content by default? I can't believe how long it's taking to get there, but how useful a feature that would be for those of us that are sometimes forced to work on metered connections.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
They are a dime a dozen now. CNN should not resort to Google ads. They should include high quality selections.
Why is there not a way to whitelist sites to allow automatic video playback? When I open a YouTube link, it's because I want to watch the video. That seems drastically different than autoplay ads or the garbage CNN forcibly shoves down your throat.
On desktop, Chrome has a Media Engagement Index (MEI), which measures the propensity to consume media for each site you visit. You can check your MEI for each site by navigating to the chrome://media-engagement internal page. The MEI is determined by a ratio of visits to significant media playback events per origin, with these four factors taken into account:
Oh, because Google wants to control what gets auto-played and what doesn't. Of course, how silly of me to expect them to grant lowly users this power.
We received mixed results with YouTube videos, however — sometimes they played automatically and other times they did not.
That famed Google quality.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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WHY WAS IT ADDED in the first place?
Youtube channels' videos
Does your combination kill a motion JPEG player written in pure CSS, without using any specific rules for the domain it's on?
They dont give a shit about doing this for their own sites, like YouTube. Why do they need to add shit like this to the browser when they could just as well fix their own fucking sites first??
Nope, google is special you see.
Blocking audio is nice, but I'd really like to see controls on videos. Although ... maybe not. If you've gone out of your way to make sure I can neither fast-forward your video nor even see how long it is, you've pretty much told me it's a waste of my time.
Nope, no sig
Wait, so YouTube, owned by Google, is defaulted to auto-play. Chrome, also owned by Google, is defaulted to block auto-play. Is it not incredibly obvious that Google is conflicted as to whether it should exploit users via auto-play, or cater to their needs by blocking said auto-play?
This is what happens when companies get too big. There are a thousand tentacles, none of which know what the others are doing. They might as well be separate companies... so they really should be separate companies.
Is it just me, or is this latest Chrome running at the speed of grass growth? I had to dust up my Firefox to get anything done! It's not my OS (ubuntu, patched every hour), hardware (Ryzen 1700X).... it must be some obscure dependency, but I'm surprised not more people are actually speaking up about it. I don't be lieve FOR A SECOND I'm the only one with this issue.
Cheers guys!
Google will elevate sites in search results if there is an associated video on the page. Once people twigged onto this, every site out there (especially news sites) started putting tangentially related videos at the top of their pages. These videos almost never match the actual content of the page in question. It's a big problem, but if you want your site to rank in Google, you have to play along (so to speak).
So now everyone is going to cheer Google for making the web more friendly via Chrome...??
Anyone know of a Chrome or even FireFox extension that allows one to stop javascript on a site without reloading the page? My issue is some sites that I need to use, need javascript to initially load, but once loaded, no longer need it for anything bug ads. All of the Chrome extensions I found to block JavaScript require reloading the page, which breaks the page.
...just a muted release party.
If you're on OSX, Safari has multiple ways to disable video autoplay. There is the easy way, or the bullet proof method which also stops autoplay from social media like Facebook. Never needed a blocker app.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
...web standard by the World Wide Web Consortium! Oh, I forget. No one following standards, they just set their own.
My Amiga has been doing this from day one! ;-)
TFS doesn't make it completely clear if the videos are blocked from auto-play, or if they are muted. I'd prefer the former, so the video is not consuming my bandwidth; letting it play, but muting the audio, is a first step, but less than I want.
I can see justification in letting YouTube play, though, because someone visiting YouTube is kinda likely to want to play a video :-)
Most of the time I go to read an article and have to get ready to pause the auto-playing video of something that's got absolutely nothing to do with the article itself. Why is there a need to play a video about something completely irrelevant?! Often times they don't even play an ad first, they're just wasting bandwidth for no good reason. It's no wonder most of these sites are failing. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
When you're on a cable modem with caps, this can be a real problem. I've dozed off watching a YouTube video after a long day at work. Woke up 5 hours later to find it streaming out videos as fast as it can. The next you know, you've busted your cap.