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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.
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.
If your video autoplays, your site is now muted. Permanently.
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'd actually prefer if Youtube didn't autoplay. That may be the reason I'm visiting the page, but I honestly sometimes just want to see the comments first or queue it up before either showing someone else or plugging into a TV
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.
vimeo.com? pornhub.com? redtube.com?
There's quite a few websites where the primary purpose is to play videos.
it's unwanted (keep up Google).
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.
you do realize autoplay exists and proliferates for the similar reason that e-mail spam does? because, much to our chagrin, pages with autoplay DO perform better than those without!
I hate autoplay probably as much as almost everyone on Slashdot, and close almost instantly every page that does it. but as long as majority of visitors sticks around longer, click on ads etc. with autoplay, as long as that behavior stays prevalent, it's going to only get worse.
Pale Moon. So potentially Firefox too.
Autoplay isn't disabled by default, but it's trivial to toggle.
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.
I still get stuff that autoplays on Pale Moon.
If only there was a control, on the video, that allowed you to start and stop the video playing when YOU want it to. . .
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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.
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?
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?
I concur 100%. We've had playlists for decades now. That's how you know someone wants your shit to auto-play. If it's not in a playlist? It should not play until "play" is clicked.
This is not fucking rocket science.
I use uBlock to kill video players on websites that autoplay. In general, that means if a website auto-plays, I will likely never watch a video on their site again. I'm going to block them all, and I'm unlikely to be tempted to disable uBlock to see their shit.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor