Chrome 70 Won't Ship With a Patch For Autoplay-Blocking Web Audio API Which Broke Web Apps and Games Earlier This Year (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this year, Google made a seemingly crowd-pleasing tweak to its Chrome browser and created a crisis for web game developers. Its May release of Chrome 66 muted sites that played sound automatically, saving internet users from the plague of annoying auto-playing videos. But the new system also broke the audio of games and web art designed for the old audio standard -- including hugely popular games like QWOP, clever experiments like the Infinite Jukebox, and even projects officially showcased by Google. After a backlash over the summer, Google kept blocking autoplay for basic video and audio, but it pushed the change for games and web applications to a later version. That browser version, Chrome 70, is on the verge of full release -- but the new, autoplay-blocking Web Audio API isn't part of it yet. Google communications manager Ivy Choi tells The Verge that Chrome will start learning the sites where users commonly play audio, so it can tailor its settings to their preferences. The actual blocking won't start until Chrome 71, which is due in December.
Is the little icon on the tab that lets me mute tabs individually. That's beyond a killer feature.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Dear Google: You don't get to change web standards randomly. The purpose of having a standard is there's a Stable Specification that developers write their applications against, and specifications stay the same and don't get willy-nilly changes until a new major version is ready, and the application sets a flag that it is ready to use the new version of the standard; your browser should be compliant and not suddenly change from developer expectations... stop coming up with random updates (planned or not) that make your browser start randomly doing weird stuff that breaks shit.
I'm all for muting annoying auto-plays, but you need to treat it like the PopUp blocker: Alert the user that your software has done something weird to stop a likely annoyance, and let the user easily override it for the site or disable AutoAudio blocking entirely.
Blocking annoying auto play video? Check
Pissing off nerdy video game dorks? Check
Now if Chrome can just replace anime with a banner that says GET A LIFE, LOSER, it would have the trifecta
Auto-play anything harkens back to the days of <blink> markup.
It's the same thing, only different sensory organ. And it is all intrusive, dreadful, and the perps should be locked in Gitmo until they get their minds right.
Apparently I'm the only person who doesn't turn my speakers on unless I intend to use them. Nor do I have fifty tabs open on fifty different sites which play music.
I guess keeping things simple is too difficult for most people.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Muting them is a start, but not good enough.
Not downloading or playing the fecking things would be actually saving internet users from this shit.
Muting it still wastes my bandwidth, CPU, and time as I pause the damned thing.
And, no, I don't give a fuck about people who make shit with autoplay videos they think is useful, your autoplay garbage has no value to me, and I don't want my browser to show it.
Firefox still allows mother fucking pop UNDERS! If you got used to browsing with Chrome you probably forgot pop-unders were even a thing, but with Firefox you can experience the web like it's still 2004!
If I've never heard of it, it's probably not hugely popular except in your bubble.
That said, it doesn't hurt someone to click a little more and get the content they want to work. I'd rather have that then be forced to watch/listen to crap when I'm trying to read something.
Kids these days. It used to take me a day to craft a working DOS boot disk for the perfect himem + joystick drivers.
Chrome isn't broken, the sites needing the autoplay functionality are what's broken.
Before you go start learning which sites I want audio to play on, and which sites I want the autoplay videos starting up, and which sites are games I play, let me make this really easy for you: From now on, as in forever, don't play a video or sound or a game until I specifically tell you to.
On linux with the latest Chrome update I now need to refresh the page if I pause the video... These folks are google really have some strange ideas about what users want...
That's the shitty thing about using frameworks like PhaserJS to make games as a hobby: They run in a web browser that is subject to whims of others and there's fuck all you can do about it, unless you want fork the browser and package it with your game too (which defeats the purpose of using things like PhaserJS dor their simplicity).
The clusterfuck workaround to get the game to play sound in Chrome/Chromium breaks the game entirely in Firefox - doesn't even load. So that's great...
But everything is ok, because Google is going to fix everything by magically learning that sites hosted on my local network get special permissions, right? :/
After this project is finished, fuck it, I'm going back to the Commodore 64. At least anything Ibmake for it will always "juat work"...
Heh... That's what ya get when ya turn off auto correct for privacy lol...