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.

Comments

Didn't work on CNN just now

[Jay Maynard]

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?