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Google Fixes Issue That Broke Millions of Web-Based Games in Chrome (bleepingcomputer.com)
Google this week rolled out an update to Chrome to patch a bug that had rendered millions of web-based games useless. From a report: The bug was introduced in mid-April when Google launched Chrome 66. One of this release's features was its ability to block web pages with auto-playing audio. [...] Not all games were affected the same. For some HTML5 games, users could re-enable audio by interacting with the game's canvas via a click-to-play interaction. Unfortunately, older games and those that weren't coded with such policy remained irrevocably broken, no matter what Chrome options users tried to modify in their settings sections. [...] With today's release of Chrome for Desktop v66.0.3359.181, Google has now fixed this issue, but only temporarily. John Pallett, a product manager at Google, admitted that Google "didn't do a good job of communicating the impact of the new autoplay policy to developers using the Web Audio API." He said, for this reason, the current version of Chrome, v66, will no longer automatically mute Web Audio objects.
There are *millions* of web-based games? Millions?
...in order to be played.
Heavy handed browser update policies are the reason I only use Edge
Note that a lot of the developer community has made a pretty reasonable ask, for the browser to prompt the user and make it transparent to the web developer by default. Still auto-mute, but have a default UI in the browser to ask user to unmute the tab.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
So google and other big IT players petition to get their special HTML5 garbage into every browser, modify the standard so only they can use it effectively, then break it when it threatens their advertising revenue.
This is the web standard we have now. Infected Open Sores!
Moving forward, I'd like to see browser makers offer the same kind of "click to allow" functionality for this sort of policy change that they currently have for Flash content.
So long as it isn't a security risk, there's little reason to not provide the user with an easy way to override this sort of quality-of-life policy change.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
It was tense there for a minute, but the advertising tap is flowing once again!
It also "rendered millions of web-based games useless" because Chrome's the only browser.
There's a pun available in the word "rendered" too, but can't be bothered.
It was a policy change that a lot of us applaud, and a few people did not like.
They've changed a lot of other policies that break things, and haven't relented. Those weren't "bugs". Apparently the criteria is if it breaks a game.
Hope they will fix that too, it's since v62 and doesn't have any remedy.
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
Why do they not just mute audio instead with a visual notification on the tab.
And, presumably for the old games, the audio objects successfully initialise and 'work' as far as the JavaScript code can tell. It's just ignoring the audio data.
Once the user unmutes the tab, the audio objects should start working again - but completely invisibly to the JavaScript.
(As I understand it, half the problem is the JavaScript objects refuse to initialize until after user interaction -- but these games are never expecting they'd have to reinitalize the audio; or that there would ever be any point in doing that.)
I don't for a minute believe no Google employee ever plays a web based game on their PC. Not for a second, so Google had to know this would break at least some web based games using Chrome. This is always the problem trying to address one and creating another. You know what, I really don't need a auto mute feature in Chrome. I do something way more simple, I just mute my PC speakers. Unless I want to specifically watch some content with audio, my PC's are typically muted. In fact one PC for the longest time simply had no audio capability and I did not miss it.
I'm assuming they're afraid someone is going to hurt themselves with this, or they'd just provide a fucking option. Making this a choice for the user would likely have avoided the issue altogether. Having trouble trying to determine if they're practicing for future nanny-states in which anything sharper than a bowling ball will need to be made out of special foam, and heavily regulated, or if they're just trying to stay ahead of Firefox in the most important browser performance metric, the version number. Anyhow, I've had enough of the horseshit from both Mozilla and Google, so don't expect to hear much more out of me, regarding browsers, their plugins and API,etc., as I've thoroughly spoken my piece. Yes, I am aware that nobody actually cares; these are opinions, after all. Just a note to Google and Mozilla, it's been years since I was a hard-line advocate for either of your softwares.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
The big issue is it disabled the behavior with no way the end user could re-enable it.
It should work alot like an adblocker and display a clickable notice when it blocks the audio that the user can just click to re-enable.
It is just easier to buy the pass over autoplay block from Google. Of course all the ads sold via them can autoplay. This is what happens when a evil corporation gets dominant market share.
Google is going to great lengths to block auto-playing audio, but it seems to me that they are missing the obvious solution: give the user control.
Personally, I don't want any autoplay, not audio and not video. Give me the option to disable both. News sites that automatically start playing some video - if I went to the site to read some article, I don't even want the video downloaded, much less played.
Give the user control over default settings: should audio/video be (a) played, (b) downloaded but not played until requested, (c) not even downloaded unless requested. Add a whitelist option. Done.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
There are some interesting comments about the change Google pushed out. Google's patch is to roll back part of the audio muting policy until October.
My favourite comment is this one:
Unfortunately, the great majority of existing work will not be updated by October, or ever, and so we still face the effective cultural erasure of those works in October. You guys definitely have the power to break everyone's work, should you wish to exercise that power, but you do not have the power to make people add workarounds to code that they are not able to alter (for all the various reasons that have been given here). Nobody has that power.
This just shows the mentality of people. If some people are too silly to maintain their code base it is no the responsibility of others to maintain backwards compatibility. That isn't "cultural erasure" any more than not being able to run an 8bit game on Windows 10 for which you no longer have the code.
If you want to preserve your "culture" make the game available along with the system requirements (old version of Firefox and Windows) and dump it into a museum somewhere. The world is not a better place just because some old garbage keeps working.
Is it important to maintain the ability of a few web-based games to run at the expense of everyone else on the Web, who are then forced to watch irritating autoplay videos when they open a Web page? At least, they could make the autoplay function a non-default option in the settings.