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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.
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.
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.
I don't give a shit if that's the primary purpose, do not autoplay videos.
When I have 19 youtube pages open at the same time it's kind of important that at least 18 of them are not actually sending signals to my sound card. It's merely sensible that they're also not using system resources processing complex mathematics to the benefit of nobody.
Vimeo, DailyMotion, Twitch.. they can all wait patiently until I'm ready to view their content and explicitly indicate this through interaction with an appropriate control on their web page.
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.
While this is a good feature I don't trust Google's motives. hey have done this to drive more business toward AdWords, that would never get blocked.
AdWords, the internet's least offensive form of advertising. Sometimes the motives of a for profit organisation actually align just fine with the desires of users.