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Chrome 66 Arrives With Autoplaying Content Blocked By Default (venturebeat.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the sound-of-silence dept.

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.

16 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. About time by sbrown123 · · Score: 3

    So many sites playing audio and video ads nowadays. And they work more diligently than the best ad blockers at getting in your face.

    1. Re:About time by jellomizer · · Score: 2

      It got past the Ad Blocker. Hence why it bothered me so. It was just so unexpected.

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    2. Re:About time by squiggleslash · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's not just advertisers. Who else is fed up with clicking on a news link only for it to start playing a 720P autoplaying video version of the same article that's already written below it? The web isn't a fucking television you stupid fuckers. Offer people a video if they want one, but don't shove this bandwidth sucking loud piece of shit I never asked for, that takes longer to consume than the writing below it, on me. Assholes.

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  2. Good by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 4

    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?

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    #DeleteFacebook
  3. Didn't work on CNN just now by Jay+Maynard · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

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    1. Re:Didn't work on CNN just now by sinij · · Score: 2

      Primary motivation for rolling HTML5 media was that Flash was too easy to auto-block.

    2. Re:Didn't work on CNN just now by JackieBrown · · Score: 2

      I won't go to CNN anymore. When you pause it an scroll down, it opens a little window at the bottom of the browser playing again!

      Fox has started doing this as well.

      I don't mind them including the video, I just don't get why they set it to autoplay. I get it with ads. I don't like it but I at least understand why they would force it on us. I don't understand why they feel the need to force the video news's clip on a written article.

  4. Feudal by jbmartin6 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:Feudal by jbmartin6 · · Score: 2

      I'm always willing to give Google the middle finger.

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  5. Re:We successfully fought BLINK by Jay+Maynard · · Score: 2

    Because clicks on an ad are taken as positive feedback.

    Not to mention that they'll track you and start showing you more ads for that seller...

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  6. Every browser should do this by DrXym · · Score: 2
    Autoplay videos are intensely annoying, especially on many news websites that play a video and then continue playing *other* videos when the first one ends. Not only that, but they make the video follow you down the page when presumably you're just reading the article the video summarises. It is profoundly annoying.

    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.

  7. Re:We successfully fought BLINK by amazingxkcd · · Score: 2

    or just browse the internet with Lynx. Who needs fancy schmancy looking symbols & signs these days?

  8. How about blocking? by grasshoppa · · Score: 2

    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.

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  9. Re:We successfully fought BLINK by rockmuelle · · Score: 2

    Exactly why a click campaign may work. At some point, advertising budgets have to be justified. While initially the clicks will be seen as a positive, after a quarter or two of no uptick in revenue relative to ad spend, those ad budgets will start to get questioned.

    Procter and Gamble is continuing to cut online ad spend due to the ineffectiveness of their ads. They're on the leading edge here, it's just up to the community to help move everyone else down that path (http://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/when-procter-gamble-cut-200-million-in-digital-ad-spend-its-marketing-became-10-more-effective/)

    For tracking, the goal is to decrease the signal to noise ratio and make the tracking databases worthless.

  10. Re:And there was much rejoicing! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    They DID do it first. It's been in FF for a long time. See media.autoplay.enabled.

  11. Whitelist by nmb3000 · · Score: 2

    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.

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