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

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.

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

[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.

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.