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.

Comments

What keeps me in Firefox

[rsilvergun]

Is the little icon on the tab that lets me mute tabs individually. That's beyond a killer feature.

Re:What keeps me in Firefox

[dgatwood]

What I really want is the ability to blacklist sites from which I never want to hear audio. CNN, I'm looking at you.

Re:What keeps me in Firefox

[Blue Stone]

I noticed the Firefox mute icon on a tab doesn't mute Flash audio for me. I don't, however, know if it's the same for other people.

Re:What keeps me in Firefox

[mysidia]

Probably doable using a Chrome extension. Not to endorse particular software, but
a search suggests Silent Site Sound Blocker might fit the bill.

So what you really want exists --- although IMO this ought to be core browser functionality,
along with the ability to blacklist/whitelist a site for a picklist of a variety of other commonly abused features, such as:

* Ability to script at all

* Ability to script beyond a very restricted feature set with many limitations to prevent web annoyances.

* After a document is rendered: ability to move or render a visible element invisible in response to an event other than a click.

* After a document is rendered: ability to have an event hook move or make visible new elements on a page layered on top of existing elements other than in response to a click action. (Prevent websites from randomly displaying new overlays that popup mid-screen on a timer or move when scrolling)

* Override/Disable Right click -- should be blacklisted by default most websites except 'rich HTML5 applications' (prevent websites from interfering with or overriding the default context menu)

* Deselect text or override left-click actions (prevent site from interfering with the ability to select text)

Re:What keeps me in Firefox

[organgtool]

Mod parent up! I came here to say the same thing. I haven't been bothered by annoying autoplay videos for quite some time since I used that extension to only whiteliste a few sites.

Re:What keeps me in Firefox

[Gavagai80]

Chrome has had tab muting for ages.

What I want is to actually stop videos from autoplaying so they don't waste my data and slow my computer. I've got extensions that stop some videos but nothing stops them all.

Re:What keeps me in Firefox

[green1]

To bad chrome doesn't allow any extensions on mobile.

Re:What keeps me in Firefox

[green1]

Some people browse on their phones.

Re:What keeps me in Firefox

[dgatwood]

I tried that previously, and it didn't work, but now that you mentioned it, I tried again. It turns out that I was just not being pedantic enough.

Muting cnn.com mutes only URLs that start with exactly http[s]://cnn.com/ and not www.cnn.com, money.cnn.com, etc. So you have to explicitly individually blacklist every subdomain that they serve content from. [The more you know....]

Re:What keeps me in Firefox

[DNS-and-BIND]

Why do you even visit CNN.com? They just said "Kanye West is what happens when Negroes donâ(TM)t read." WTF? They also said Trump looked like he had racist thoughts talking to Kanye West. How do they read minds like that? They're a discredited media operation, credible people don't consume their content.

Re:What keeps me in Firefox

[antdude]

SeaMonkey for me. I wished it would hurry up to use newer than "User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0 SeaMonkey/2.49.4". :(

Please tell Google quit breaking web APIs

[mysidia]

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.

Re:Please tell Google quit breaking web APIs

[jellomizer]

Your number is low. I would figure you would had suffered the browser wars of the 1990's

Where we had Internet Explorer and Netscape fighting tooth and nail to break the standard, and add features that only their browser supports. In hope there will be enough developers who use it so the end user wouldn't use the other browser.

This type of stuff never went away. Every 10 years or so, a browser decides it will support the standard as written. Then it starts adding extra stuff, until there is a functional difference in a website from your browser with an other.

Re:Please tell Google quit breaking web APIs

[lgw]

Chrome is the new IE6.

Google clearly figures its market share is big enough that it can just ignore standards. The world turns, and everything old is new again.

Re:Please tell Google quit breaking web APIs

[Luthair]

The problem is that developers at many companies are abusing the APIs. Quite frankly they should have continued with the change, the number of browser users who actually use the apps & games are in the minority compared to the number of browser users who are constantly bombarded with trash.

Re:Please tell Google quit breaking web APIs

[Gavagai80]

IE6 didn't ignore standards because they wanted to innovate and figured they were big enough to force others to follow them. IE6 ignored standards because they couldn't be bothered to implement anything and it was basically abandonware.

Re:Please tell Google quit breaking web APIs

[lgw]

In the early days of IE6, it was the 90% player, and MS was adding "features" left and right. They were implementing like crazy, just implementing their own stuff.

Re:Please tell Google quit breaking web APIs

[Waccoon]

The only difference is that these days, web developers LOVE Chrome and its special way of doing things. That's why so many damn web sites work almost exclusively with Chrome, even though other browsers are perfectly competent.

IE couldn't keep up with the flashy presentational stuff, and that resulted in margins being off by a pixel or two. Web developers howled. Google's stuff cause entire web pages to show up blank and otherwise not function at all in other browsers that are fully HTML5 compliant. No problem, as long as my animated special effects look okay.

Everyone is at fault, and it's a goddamn mess. That's mostly why I quit web development years ago.

boo hoo hoo

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:boo hoo hoo

[jellomizer]

If you are going to have auto-play. The Video should be visible in your window (Not scrolled somewhere past your viewing angle, and on a background tab)

However I would prefer not to have auto-play, at least with sound.

Re:boo hoo hoo

[dgatwood]

That makes it easier to pause it, but it does nothing for the fundamental problem, which is that every time a website auto-plays a video on my laptop while I'm tethered to my cell phone, it costs me actual money for content that I usually don't care about.

Autoplay — even when it isn't used in ads — is evil incarnate. There is no redeeming value to forcing every user's browser to start loading tens or hundreds of megabytes of video data without user interaction. There is no valid reason for doing it, even if it is muted. The lack of muting just makes the difference between "I will never visit your site while tethered" and "I will never visit your site unless I am at home or on a computer with an audio disabling plug installed."

Bullshit ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Its May release of Chrome 66 muted sites that played sound automatically, saving internet users from the plague of annoying auto-playing videos

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.

hugely popular games like QWOP

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:This is a problem?

[dunkelfalke]

Yes, you are the chosen one, Neo.
Normal people often listen to some music while they surf the web and autoplay seriously ruins the experience.

Chrome isn't broken

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome isn't broken, the sites needing the autoplay functionality are what's broken.

Lemme make it easy for you, Chrome

[CharlesAKAChuck]

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.