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Google Says Chrome Blocks 'About Half' of Unwanted Autoplays (venturebeat.com)
When Google released Chrome 66 just over two weeks ago, it received lots of attention and praise for introducing the ability to mute autoplaying videos with sound until you press play. Today, Chrome product manager John Pallett revealed that "the new policy blocks about half of unwanted autoplays." VentureBeat reports: Pallett also shared that "a significant number" of autoplays are paused, muted, or have their tab closed within six seconds by Chrome users. He didn't say how many exactly, as the number varies significantly from site to site. But that shouldn't surprise anyone, given how much work Google put into this latest feature. Chrome decides which autoplaying content to stop in its tracks by learning your preferences and ranking each website according to your past behavior. If you don't have browsing history with a site, Chrome allows autoplay for over 1,000 sites where Google says the highest percentage of visitors play media with sound (sites where media is the main point of visiting the site). As you browse the web, Chrome updates that list by enabling autoplay on sites where you play media with sound during most of your visits, and disables it on sites where you don't.
While this is a good feature I don't trust Google's motives. They have done this to drive more business toward AdWords, that would never get blocked.
I've already done something that works around this by auto showing video using a wasm version of ffmpeg and rendering it to canvas. Problem solved!
Just a simple setting will do.
Well, I don't use any Google products anyway because I self-respect. So I don't care about any Chrome garbage and neither should anybody who self-respects.
Autoplay video like the "mind-blowingly inconsiderate, rude, and completely unaware co-worker" of the web. There has literally never, ever been an instance where some video started playing and I was all like "Oh, wow, I am so fucking grateful I didn't have to click a button to make that happen." There are dozens of instances per day where I'm clicking to make it stop (well, before some of the browsers started clamping down).
Autoplay is just obnoxious and rude. Sites that use it are obnoxious and rude. People who develop and implement it are obnoxious and rude. Fuck them all in the ass with a nuclear weapon.
I would throw out a guess that I don't want to see over 95% of non youtube vidoes that try to play on web pages. Even youtube's going onto the next video would fall under this 95%. Pretty much, unless your video is on youtube, I don't want to see it. That 3D animation your company paid $30k for that resulted in mathematically perfect workers kind of forward moon walking while carrying your product is at the bottom of my list. I came to your site for a price or contact info. The news article that won't shut up and has the video follow me down the page while I read the article is at the bottom of my list.
... half wanted! Works as your average village idiot.
If your video autoplays, your site is now muted. Permanently.
Like popups, NOBODY wants autoplaying videos, yet they're all over the place. Lemme make this easier for you, Google, and the same setting applies to all other browsers: Youtube.com gets to autoplay videos. That's it. Nothing else gets to autoplay videos because I went to a website. If I want a video playing, I'll click the play button. How hard is that?
Point your browser at the Chicken Noodle Network (cnn.com). They not only have an autoplay video, they make the damned thing follow you down as you read the page. Please block that.
>"Google Says Chrome Blocks 'About Half' of Unwanted Autoplays""
Sorry, but simply muting is not "blocking" autoplaying videos. If the video is playing, it is still using bandwidth, using CPU, using power, and is visually extremely annoying.
Fail.
Let us know you when you *actually* block autoplay and when you can do it more like 80+% of the time, like I can do in Firefox right now with the "Disable HTML5 Autoplay" addon.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...
Far from perfect, but much better (IMHO) than what Chrome does.
Most of what you've said is true, but you missed what has made Google not only by far the largest marketing company in history, but one of the world's largest and most successful companies. You've missed what they have that nobody else does, their number one most valuable asset.
What marketing data companies used to do, and most still do, is collect information about leads and sell their lists to each other. Company A would sell their list to Company B. Company B would combine that with some of their own data and sell it to company C. Company C would merge it with some data from D, and sell the combined list to Company A. They all ended up with a lot of the same data, the data going round and round in circles. None of the companies had that much valuable data that wasn't already in the hands of many other companies. A lot of these traditional market data companies only lasted a few years. Some survive, but aren't household names, they aren't major companies like the big manufacturing companies, entertainment companies, etc.
Google did something different. Google realized their data was only really valuable if it was data that other companies didn't have. So they set up AdWords, allowing customers to place ads that make use of the data, without ever letting anyone else actually get the data. By never, ever selling the data they keep ahold of their most valuable asset. That's why Anthem Marketing is worth about $16 million and Google is worth $750 BILLION. Because Google guards their data like Coke guards their secret recipe.
It loads and plays all the ads, and then crashes thus ending the ads.
Firefox 59 is so unstable it crashes on about 1/4 of all the pages I open.... but I'm avoiding ads like crazy!
it's unwanted (keep up Google).
Who are the assholes who invented autoplay in the first place?
They should all be shot. No one wants a video that plays automatically on a web page.
No one.
Chrome is now about half as useful as the average adblocker.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And I mean really block it, not just mute it. I don't need the wasted CPU, memory and net bandwidth on video I don't want. The javascript alone is already a burden.
.......
I noticed some sites now offer their player with a auto on/off switch within the player controls. Seems more useful then Chrome trying to block or stop it. I agree, that I don't like auto play content but clearly some of this is because ads generally play before the content. Some sites I don't go to anymore because of the annoying video ads and pop out players which seem insistent on you watching the damn video.
Just block them all!
Then you will have a 100% success rate, and when you actually want it to play, just press the play button, it's doesn't require much effort.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I cannot imagine when any user would want auto-playing video and sound on a web site. I use Chrome and I have not noticed any decline in the number of these irritating auto-playing and pop-up videos. I particularly hate the news sites where the video will pop up on the right hand side of the screen if you stop it at the top of the page -- and no close button is provided in the pop-up window.
Let us know you when you *actually* block autoplay and when you can do it more like 80+% of the time, like I can do in Firefox right now with the "Disable HTML5 Autoplay" addon.
Does your autoplay blocker also block motion JPEG implemented in pure CSS?
Block autoplaying muted video, and sites will fall back to autoplay methods that use even more CPU or bandwidth: animated GIF, FFmpeg's VP8 decoder compiled to asm.js or WebAssembly and rendering to a <canvas>, scripted JPEG/PNG rotation, or even pure CSS JPEG/PNG rotation.
Firefox doesn't stop unwanted autoplays on youtube.com, which is by far the biggest offender.
(CAPTCHA: disagree)
In Firefox ESR 52, currently the default in Debian 9 "Stretch", this galloping horse got past media.autoplay.enabled = false. Does current Firefox add CSS animation blocking?
Granted you have to know about the media.autoplay.enabled setting
Thanks a lot. Even avoids the ads you get before the video - just click the next button. Don't even see the first few seconds :-)
Seriously does anyone want auto playing videos besides crappy advertisers? And they want a pat on the back for what, allowing 1/2 to get through? They have the power the stop them all, and they should be tarred and feathered for not using it.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
We do not want for you to do any analysis on what we are or are not interested in preventing from autoplaying. We are interested in a feature that will prevent EVERYTHING from autoplaying, except for those sites that we explicitly whitelist. This is FAR easier to implement than the ridiculous mumbo-jumbo that you are pushing. Which you are doing for one of two reasons - either you guys are stupid and can't see it, or else you are doing so because you want the autoplay feature untouched for some specific sites - in which cases, you are a bunch of crooks. Which is it?
When flash ads or animation would autoplay?
I was annoying back then, it's still annoying for videos/html5 whatever tech in the future.
cap: bandage
Like google putting a bandage on a hemorraging problem
I never want videos to start automatically when I visit a website, and I certainly don't want a website to randomly start making noise. Who wants that?
I think Google uses AI (Artificial Intelligence) or some kind of machine learning algorithm in it. Some reports were coming in past few years that some big tech giants like Facebook, Google etc are working on it. I think this is also a type of it or some kind of small experiment before big announcement or update.