Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Chrome Communications Google Music The Internet

Google Chrome Will No Longer Autoplay Content With Sound In January 2018 (venturebeat.com) 81

Posted by BeauHD from the attention-seeking dept.
Starting next year, Google Chrome will only autoplay a given piece of content when the media won't play sound or the user has indicated an interest in the media. The company was experimenting with such an option last month, but now it looks to be part of the browser's roadmap. VentureBeat reports: Chrome 63 will add a new user option to completely disable audio for individual sites. This site-muting option will persist between browsing sessions, allowing users to customize when and where audio will play. Chrome 64 will take the controls to the next level. By this version, Google's browser will allow autoplay to occur only when users want media to play. Here is Google's timeline for making autoplaying sound more consistent with user expectations in Chrome: September 2017: Site muting available in Chrome 63 Beta, begin collecting Media Engagement Index (MEI) data in Chrome 62 Canary and Dev; October 2017: Site muting available in Chrome 63 Stable, autoplay policies available in Chrome 63 Canary and Dev; December 2017: Autoplay policies available in Chrome 64 Beta; January 2018: Autoplay policies available in 64 Stable.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Google Chrome Will No Longer Autoplay Content With Sound In January 2018 More

Google Chrome Will No Longer Autoplay Content With Sound In January 2018

Comments Filter:

  • So, how about video? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Snotnose ( 212196 ) on Friday September 15, 2017 @08:30PM (#55207195)
    I hate autoplay video. I never want to see them, and they suck up my bandwidth even when I set them to stop (they keep loading , thinking I'll change my mind).

    Google, I know you own youtube. But FFS I don't want 99.999% of the videos websites want to push on me. I don't want them eating up my bandwidth. I don't want them sucking up my memory. I flat out do not fucking want auto play video to do anything but fail for me.

    • RTFS (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I hate autoplay video. I never want to see them, and they suck up my bandwidth even when I set them to stop (they keep loading , thinking I'll change my mind).

      Google, I know you own youtube. But FFS I don't want 99.999% of the videos websites want to push on me. I don't want them eating up my bandwidth. I don't want them sucking up my memory. I flat out do not fucking want auto play video to do anything but fail for me.

      Read the fucking SUMMARY.

      Chrome 64 will take the controls to the next level. By this version, Google's browser will allow autoplay to occur only when users want media to play.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

        That's a pretty good decision, it might not be perfect and there may be sites out there that circumvents it.

        But whenever I get an autoplay video on a web page I feel the urge to poke out the eardrums and eyes of anyone that decided it was a good idea.

        Only on dedicated video pages like YouTube, Vimeo etc. it's OK since that's their primary purpose.

        • I don't want youtube autoplaying either. I want to open it up and read the description and other details before deciding when I want to press play.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

            I don't want youtube autoplaying either. I want to open it up and read the description and other details before deciding when I want to press play.

            Ditto. But not because I want to read the description, I want to open the video links in new tabs. I don't want them to start playing immediately because I might open 3-4 videos I'm interested in watching and then they all start playing together in a mish-mash of sound. Just open the video and let it wait for me, because I'll eventually get to it and watch it. Wh

      • Why'd it take them so long? In fact, why does *any* browser allow auto-playing video? It should have been disallowed and blocked by the browsers as soon as the advertisers started doing it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GNious ( 953874 )

      Not understood - I've had Firefox set to not auto-play media for a least a couple of years now, why wouldn't you just do the same if you hate auto-playing videos that much?

  • February? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Friday September 15, 2017 @08:33PM (#55207207) Journal

    Google Chrome Will No Longer Autoplay Content With Sound In January 2018

    But what about February?

    • Google Chrome Will No Longer Autoplay Content With Sound In January 2018

      But what about February?

      That might be a real concern.

  • And within a month, sites will start popping up something that says, "We see you've blocked video with sound! We understand why, but we depend on that support to provide you the best experience and keep our site running smoothly."

    And you won't be able to browse the site.
    • Hopefully, since it's an embedded feature and not an extension, sites will not be able to determine if the browser is actually muting the video.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by txmason ( 882110 )
      Fine with me. They can join Forbes in my go-fuck-yourself list.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mfearby ( 1653 )

      Then those sites can get F***ED as far as I'm concerned. They're a plague on the internet and they can die a slow, cashless, death. Good riddance to bad rubbish, and get the hell off my lawn! Damn teenagers :-)

    • I have found that on some sites if you just block javascript entirely, the site displays the text/image content properly, but the annoying junk doesn't happen. An example is The Spectator, which normally lets you view a few articles each month and then blocks unless you are a subscriber. If you use NoScript to not allow any javascript from The Spectator, all the text/image content is usable all the time.

    • And I don't browse the site. The people who think that their article surrounded by screaming advertisements for stuff I don't want and wouldn't buy is something I NEED, have vastly oversold that idea to themselves. I just click somewhere else. Vital information has more than one source. Everything else is entertainment and I can find something else to entertain me.

  • Do some Google advertising deals for autoplay videos with sound expire on 12/31?

  • Browsers should have limits (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Friday September 15, 2017 @09:07PM (#55207377)

    Anything 'multimedia' should get a placeholder that needs to be clicked before it even starts to download, never mind play.

    Anything cross-site should be blocked - scripts, images, style sheets... I don't care. Host it on your own server or proxy it or it shouldn't display. And in addition to being hosted on the same site, a script shouldn't be allowed to request resources from any site but the one it is loaded from.

    Cookies... I can't think of a good way to stop cookies from being used as trackers except to have it be standard that they use plain language tags and browsers offer a pop-up to show the cookies the site you're currently on is using or has placed on your system, along with the ability to delete any values you want.

    • Anything 'multimedia' should get a placeholder that needs to be clicked before it even starts to download, never mind play.

      Anything cross-site should be blocked - scripts, images, style sheets... I don't care. Host it on your own server or proxy it or it shouldn't display. And in addition to being hosted on the same site, a script shouldn't be allowed to request resources from any site but the one it is loaded from.

      Cookies... I can't think of a good way to stop cookies from being used as trackers except to have it be standard that they use plain language tags and browsers offer a pop-up to show the cookies the site you're currently on is using or has placed on your system, along with the ability to delete any values you want.

      Google provides analytics, advertising, and identity provision (among other things). All of these services are implemented as cross-site, at least in part.

      They also make Chrome.

    • Anything cross-site should be blocked - scripts, images, style sheets... I don't care. Host it on your own server or proxy it or it shouldn't display.

      So instead of each site that uses jQuery pointing to the same (https) googleapis.com URL, every site should keep a copy of it. That means the browser would download the entire 150kB (minified) script for each site embedded the library instead of downloading it once and using the cache-control HTTP header to control caching. This will be excellent for bandwidth and load times. My understanding is that modern browsers have JS interpreters that keep hot code in a JIT cache as well to save CPU cycles rebuilding

      • That or site operators should ask themselves if a site really needs jQuery at all [youmightno...jquery.com] as opposed to a lighter-weight framework that runs on top of vanilla [vanilla-js.com]. In fact, if a site presents mostly static documents, it can present a view that doesn't require script at all. This is a lot easier now that IE 9 and earlier have reached their end of official support, and IE 11 requires far fewer heavyweight polyfills.

        "But I have users who still use unsupported versions of Internet Explorer!" Count them again. If you still

        • Uhuh. Stop using the most popular libraries on the web to switch for something no one has ever heard of.

          I don't care one bit about unsupported versions of IE. But rewriting vast parts of the web to fix something that isn't at all broken, no one has time for that . . .

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tepples ( 727027 )

            Uhuh. Stop using the most popular libraries on the web to switch for something no one has ever heard of.

            In case you didn't read or misunderstood the pages I linked, "vanilla" means coding directly to the W3C DOM, which is practical in all major supported browsers. Besides, once the user has loaded five sites that use five different version numbers of jQuery hosted by Google, it's just as bad as five sites each self-hosting their own copy of jQuery.

            something that isn't at all broken

            Every site causing users to make their browsing habits known to Google through the Cookie:, ETag:, and Referer: request headers is broken.

  • how about off by default (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gravewax ( 4772409 ) on Friday September 15, 2017 @09:20PM (#55207431)
    how about NO FUCKING AUTO PLAY AT ALL option. I want audio and video to play ONLY when I tell it to play.

    • How about the 4th sentence of the quoted text in the summary?
      How about reading past a headline before commenting?

    • I am using Disable HTML5 autoplay [google.com] and must say, it works excellently. I recommend it.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Rob Y. ( 110975 )

      How about some nice, flexible options to allow you to control how video and other elements are handled. I certainly don't want video to autoplay anywhere - with sound or otherwise. Though it might be nice for it to start buffering automatically - but only enough so that if I were to hit play there'd be enough for it to start playing immediately. Currently, for example, Huffington Post insists on including autoplay video on almost every story it posts. I almost never want to view it. Especially, since t

  • As stated in the title.

    I respect the needs of websites that I views needs to make money but what a pain in my fucking ass.

    • Most of the time I run into this problem is on news sites playing the video clip of the article I'm reading. Not sure how that is making them money.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by skam240 ( 789197 )

        Well for starters I'm sure you get ads in these videos to. I've never been to a news site that didnt run them with there news videos. It's literally why they do autoplay on their websites so you have to watch at least part of their ads.

        After that, i generaly dont want the video version of the news as it takes longer to digest and i cant skip around to the parts I'm interested as easily.

  • Google Chrome doesn't ... (Score:3, Informative)

    by CaptainDork ( 3678879 ) on Friday September 15, 2017 @10:24PM (#55207705)

    ... auto-play now, because I use Firefox with AdBlockPro, uBlock Origin, and NoScript.

    It takes a long time for me to temporarily allow shit to load, but that's that.

    • I just use a video autoplay blocker extension for Chrome (along with uBlock Origin and javascript switcher).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GNious ( 953874 )

      That has to be the longest way about it
      About:config, then find "media.autoplay.enabled", set to disabled.

      • That's a single-issue resolution.

        I'm not interested in that.

        NoScript turns just about ALL scripts and calls to remote locations into single-issue issues.

  • It seems google is more and more deciding whats good and whats bad, all they really should do is create a browser that does what the website asks it to do and not decide to do something else.

    • It seems google is more and more deciding whats good and whats bad, all they really should do is create a browser that does what the website asks it to do and not decide to do something else.

      Even if the website wants to download malware, send spam, etc.?

    • A web browser should do what the end user asks the website to do. Not what the website asks the browser to do to the end user.

    • Are you a malware writer, or do you work for an advertising company?

      • what's next? the browser blocks certain kind of texts which they deem inappropriate for you? Yes, if it's an option you can turn on, then it's ok, but not on by default.
  • I wonder how CNN will figure out how to beat the block this time. I'm just glad whoever runs code and features for the "unrelated videos" overlay on CNN's site is using his or her power for not as evil as he could be.

  • Why not now? (Score:3)

    by MoarSauce123 ( 3641185 ) on Saturday September 16, 2017 @05:28AM (#55208841)
    Why wait until January? This feature is long overdue.

  • 1. Leave site
    2. Don't come back

    That would get autoplay removed pretty quick. This is not like ads that they need to make money, it's just being a dick.

    • Computers are tools that automate things, so we don't have to do every little thing manually. Your suggestion isn't workable: it means I have to keep a blacklist of sites in my brain, and constantly watch out for them to avoid autoplaying video. It's much easier to have a browser (or extension) that simply blocks the autoplaying video so I don't waste my bandwidth on it, and then I can decide if I feel like staying on the site at that point or not. If I have to go to the site and experience the auto-play

  • Does this apply to sounds played with the web audio API or just embedded videos?

  • From February 2018, Firefox will only autoplay a given piece of content when the media won't play sound or the user has indicated an interest in the media.

  • Convoluted logic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    I think I'll have to draw one of them there Venn diagrams.

  • Autoplaying videos have kept me well and truly away from american news sites since about 2010. Whoever thought that was ever OK is a fucking dickhead.

Slashdot Top Deals

Some people manage by the book, even though they don't know who wrote the book or even what book.

Close