
Google show signs of reconsidering auto mute after developer critique - Theodeus
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=840866
======
ChrisSD
Usually when a major web browser decides to do something that has the
potential to break existing websites they do extensive testing and put the
call out for dev feedback before they release. Why didn't that happen here?

Also it's odd that Chrome decided to explicitly whitelist some sites. Surely
that's an admission that their automated workflow doesn't actually work well?

~~~
throwaway2048
Google is starting to show a pattern of addressing the concerns of the large
players (which themselves are a part of), and ignoring or degrading everyone
else's experience.

Good luck trying to get predicable deliverability to gmail without your mail
being put in the spam box as a small mail sender. Google refuses to even tell
you anything about why or why not mail is being delivered unless you send
hundreds of messages a day.

This is a small personal mailserver, compliant fully with DMARC/DKIM/SPF, has
RDNS, reasonably old domain (a few years), IP not and never has been on any
blacklist, reputable server provider, has been sending mail to gmail for a few
years, is not sending anything except personal mail under my direct control,
nothing that could even vaugely be considered commerical or spam of any kind.

Google still classifies it as spam, even with repeated clicking of "this is
not spam" button by my recepients, after a while it just goes back in the spam
folder, and has absolutely no hint at why, or how to change it.

To top it off im hearing reports that signing up for google suite for your
domain immediately seems to remove this mysterious "fuck you filter", and you
no longer get deliverability issues.

Ive heard similar rumours about placement in google search results, aswell as
stuff like youtube recommendations, if you aren't already in the accepted list
of stuff we wanna show you, dont bother even trying.

Its a very concerning thing because the outcry about shitty practices
targeting the things 95% of people dont see, will be by definition limited,
and yet it is these very things that are essential to remaining out under the
thumb of parties like Facebook or Google.

~~~
some_account
Why don't you move away from Google? It's like intentionally sticking to one
of the worst companies and then complaining about it.

Try fastmail, it's really great.

~~~
userbinator
It's not about _receiving_ mail, it's about _sending_ to others using Gmail
accounts.

------
mdip
As my mom always said, "This is why we can't have nice things."

I _deeply_ miss the days when all it took was installing something akin to
"Flask Block" and this problem was solved. I've been using Firefox with their
built-in autoplay blocking feature (hidden in about:config) for a while now on
my desktop and on mobile -- mainly because of idiotic news sites that seem to
think I want to listen/watch the article I clicked in to (with the included
pre-roll commercial, I assume[0]) and that my coworkers/wife want to listen to
it, too.

The solution offered by the original bug report sounds practical, but the
thing of it is, the solution that Chrome has implemented, in my opinion,
doesn't go far enough[1]. I don't just want the audio muted, I want the whole
video prevented from even _starting_ to download (on my mobile device) -- it
wastes limited data and costs me money.

It's sad that a "fix" to workaround a misuse of a feature is breaking
legitimate uses. Having done a few years on the security side of the house at
a telecom, I've tried to push developers in the direction of thinking about
solutions from these sorts of angles. It's important when designing something
to think about not just how your creation will be used, but how it can be
misused and while the latter shouldn't necessarily prevent a feature from
being implemented, it's important to weigh the two against each other and
think about ways that problems might be mitigated. This might result in the
adjustment of a feature, or it might be nothing more than a contingency plan
should nefarious use eclipse legitimate use.

[0] I run uBlock Origin so I'm not entirely sure that there's a commercial --
I can only assume because the quality of the video, which is often nothing
more than a man or woman reading the article, verbatim, in near-monotone voice
is so poor that I can't imagine this being a feature added because of user
demand.

[1] Though, muting audio is certainly a good start. I remember in the 2000s
when people would pass around e-mails with links to important sounding things
that, when clicked, would open a browser that screamed a message out of your
speakers "Hey, everybody! I'm looking at porn!". Haven't seen that in a long
time, but it'll come around again -- everything that's old is new again at
some point.

------
cm2187
What I don't understand is why they went this convoluted route of trying to
assess what's legitimate or not, what's a user interaction or not. Does anyone
know why they didn't go the route of other permissions like notifications or
location, with a discrete popup that says the page is attempting to play some
audio (or video), do you want to allow? If it is legitimate, the user clicks
allow once and the site works forever.

~~~
Klathmon
How often do you see the "want to allow X to display notifications?" or "want
to allow X to access your location?"

It's a shitty UX for everyone involved.

It's shitty for the user because they get asked it on SO MANY sites. I see
friends/family browsing the web and they will go to a news site, click "no" to
notifications, need to click away the fullscreen "want to subscribe to our
newsletter" modal, then scroll down to the content. Adding a "want to allow
this to display video" is just another step you need before being able to use
the site.

And it sucks for site owners because those that legitimately need the ability
to display video will have a pretty large percentage of their users react-
click "no" on the dialog, meaning the site is broken until that user goes into
settings and changes that one manually (and unsurprisingly, just about 0 do
that).

Now I don't necessarily agree with the choice they've made here, but I do
agree that a permissions dialog isn't the right UX.

~~~
Al-Khwarizmi
To be honest I'm not bothered by that UX at all. The browser remembers my
choice for each site, how many new, different sites do most users visit per
day (that would need audio)?

If a user doesn't want to be bothered by the prompt, they can always configure
the browser to always accept or always reject. Or use a whitelist/blacklist.

This is very different from the EU "this website has cookies" prompt, which
_does_ annoy me a lot. First of all, you are not really choosing anything
meaningful, but you still need to click. Secondly, being a website feature
(not in the browser) means you don't get a uniform UI (and sometimes it's a
nightmare on mobile). Third, it's just pointless as practically all websites
have cookies so the amount of information in those messages is close to zero.

~~~
Klathmon
>The browser remembers my choice for each site, how many new, different sites
do most users visit per day (that would need audio)?

How many sites need notifications? And why do I need to decline that
permission at least once a day if not more often?

And the issue is that putting this behind a notification removes the downsides
of asking for it. Currently if you play audio un-prompted you piss off (a
percentage of) your users. If that was behind a notification, you would only
inconvenience those users, so there's less of a downside of trying it assuming
that only people that want it would click "yes".

My "perfect solution" would be for the major browser developers to get
together, and come up with a web standard for where these
notifications/prompts will live in the browser chrome, and roughly what they
will look like, so that everyone can standardize on a similar UI. Then move
from a prompt to a "badge" of sorts, and give websites the power to instruct
users how to discover and switch that permission on/off when needed.

I believe on desktop chrome most permission prompts live in the upper-right
corner of the address bar, if we could all standardize on somethign like that
(at least on desktop, then figure something out for mobile) website owners
could then instruct users "to see notifications, click the (standard-
notification-icon) up there and select 'yes'".

For "rare" things like notifications, camera access, gps location, and others
that seems like a good tradeoff to me, but for "more common" things like
audio/video, I don't think it fits.

~~~
cm2187
That's the thing. I don't think audio and video should be that common on
websites. Outside of youtube and netflix, 99% of the time I do not want audio
or video content to play automatically.

------
mr_toad
I’ll immediately switch to using any browser that blocks auto play by default
on all websites without exception.

~~~
michaelt
Firefox -> about:config -> media.autoplay.enabled -> false

Edit: troydavis points out this Chrome option doesn't actually block autoplay:
Chrome -> chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy -> Document user activation is
required

~~~
troydavis
The Chrome flag doesn't do what it sounds like it does (and what it should).
Essentially everyone logically interprets it as blocking all auto playing
videos, audio or not, but that isn’t one of its options.

Given the number of people who hate unauthorized autoplaying video (including
silent video), it’s sort of amazing that Chrome’s product management team
hasn’t added a way to prevent it - at least as a buried config flag and
ideally as domain rules (like the “Clear cookies on exit” rules). That
wouldn’t preclude using automated heuristics to add and remove sites from the
filters, but at least there’d be a reliable way to turn it off and whitelist a
few domains.

Background from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16367457#16370471](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16367457#16370471):

“Alas, this flag only prevents video that has sound from auto-playing. It’s
the inadequate option that my earlier comment was referring to.

Here’s more: [https://www.chromium.org/audio-
video/autoplay](https://www.chromium.org/audio-video/autoplay)

[https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-
policy-changes)

Quoting the blog post, Google’s decision that ”Muted autoplay is always
allowed” is the problem. If any other Chrome users wondered why videos now
auto-play without sound (even with this option set), at least based on the
relatively minimal docs about this flag, this is why.

~~~
jamessb
> Given the number of people who hate unauthorized autoplaying video
> (including silent video), it’s sort of amazing that Chrome’s product
> management team hasn’t added a way to prevent it

I wouldn't hold much hope for them doing this - the official autoplay policy
announcement blog post says [1]:

> One cool way to engage users is about using muted autoplay and let them
> chose to unmute (see code snippet below). Some websites already do this
> effectively, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

[1]
[https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-
policy-changes)

~~~
apatters
> One cool way to engage users is about using muted autoplay and let them
> chose to unmute (see code snippet below).

This line really illustrates how poorly Google understands the role of the
browser. The browser's job isn't to help developers "engage" users, which just
means getting them to spend more of their time on the site. Why would any user
install a browser which is optimized to consume as much of their time as
possible? The browser's job is to protect me from abusive publishers, not
enable more abuse.

------
eurticket
I would suggest just having the tab muted by default, and maybe an easier
button to toggle on/off, than current right-click, to unmute/solo. Perhaps, a
limited notification for the first 100 times your tab is muted and it detects
sound being played in the tab, so you're not wondering why no sound is
playing.

~~~
oftenwrong
Something like this:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mute-sites-
by...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mute-sites-by-default/)

------
tonysdg
I'm not sure I saw any signs that they're "reconsidering" on this ticket --
just that they're now aware of how many corner cases they have.

I can easily see Google saying, "eh, that's your problem, learn to whitelist
your site with us."

~~~
SquareWheel
That's not my interpretation of their comments at all.

#55 "Chrome Product Manager for desktop here. Thank you for posting these
examples, they're superful helpful to the team. We didn't intend to break all
this awesome existing content that relies on webaudio, and we are
investigating paths forward now. More updates will follow on this bug."

~~~
gray_-_wolf
that's corporate talk for "we don't care, let's stall and come with even more
fucked up solution"

~~~
Theodeus
That's overly synical. They broke tons of their own stuff too, so my bet is on
this being genuine.

------
kartan
The Issue report is not very well done.

> Autoplay restrictions on the web have long been inconsistent and served only
> to impede legitimate use cases.

This is judgmental, and it is not backed up with any data. Has it really
"served only" to impede the legitimate uses?

> I've described this in detail in the following blog

Blog promotion.

> What is the expected behavior? Allow audio playback on page load without any
> user interaction.

Definitively this is not the expected behavior. Chromium team has defined that
no audio will be allowed until there is user interaction.

> Abusive content will just blare out audio at the first opportunity.

Yes. This is a red queen race. But doesn't means that it is not worth
pursuing.

I think that the point is valid. But the premise of the report, it is not.
With the goal of minimizing sound SPAM in the web, Chromium has imposed some
drastic measures that require changes in the interfaces of a large unknown
amount of Javascript code.

> "These restrictions require special coding to handle them. Instead, the
> browser could simply allow all playback attempts to succeed, but mute the
> master audio output. Then the browser can automatically unmute the master
> audio output the first time the user touches the screen (or whenever else it
> deems the user is OK with audio)."

The proposed solution is quite good. Let the browser show a button to enable
sound like they did with pop-ups. So all the affected companies and
individuals don't need to repeat the checks all over the internet, to create a
unified experience and to keep legacy games and applications that have no
chance of being updated.

But as another post says, there is a lot of corner cases. I can imagine a
blind user wanting to have sound without having to read some text.

The company I work for was affected by this change. And there was a lot of
problems in production. To fix it, people had to work the weekend. I know that
should not be like that, that we need to improve beta browser testing, and
such. But sometimes the realities of companies make this kind of behavioral
changes difficult.

I hope that Chromium finds a good way of keeping ads muted, while not breaking
the Internet.

------
gpmcadam
Wouldn't this be easily resolved by giving the user the option upon visiting
the site: "This website would like your permission to play audio. You can
revoke this at any time."

Similar to how storing files or sending push notifications works?

~~~
7Z7
Those are both already horrible UXs that are abused in the same way the
"subscribe to our newsletter" is. I won't ever do any of those three for 99.9%
of websites I visit, and yet 70% are requesting it.

They've become user-hostile ways to give websites a way to force interaction
from me that I don't ever want, and if I did I could chose the option in the
account preferences (if I cared enough to make one).

~~~
gpmcadam
The way that browsers typically handle this though is that your interaction
isn't blocked by the prompt. There's a default state ('disallow'), the website
can ask you for permission, and you can choose to either:

    
    
      1. Allow  
      2. Deny  
      3. Do nothing at all
    

The website then must take all three into consideration so your experience
isn't ruined as a result of a blocking-state.

I agree that the permissions system isn't ideal, and I would hope that the way
we handle this interchange in the future can improve to a point where it's
less invasive in terms of screen space. But at least for now, it shouldn't
invade your ability to continue using the site.

~~~
7Z7
Its not about being blocked from continuing, it's about having to answer
questions (or click away the dialogues) to peruse content.

And the "subscribe to our newsletter" overlay often does block progress
without hunting for the often obfuscated "no thanks" link.

------
vidanay
Now I know I've been reading too much Reddit. I was really impressed by the
well articulated, grammatically correct, and properly spelled postings in that
bug thread. My standards have been lowered too far.

------
bookofjoe
Until I read this entry's title, I'd never thought about whether Google is
singular or plural—is "Google show..." an acceptable variant of "Google
shows...?"

~~~
CrazedGeek
Both are fine. American English tends to treat collective nouns as singular,
while British English treats them as plural.
([http://www.dictionary.com/e/collective-
nouns/](http://www.dictionary.com/e/collective-nouns/))

------
thrownaway954
It might be just me, but I cannot (for the life me) understand what the issue
is here. Maybe it's because I'm not a mobile game developer or content creator
where audio and video is my life.

I think people like me would benefit with an actual side-by-side demonstration
of what the issue is now vs the resolution the author is proposing.

~~~
catbird
This new Chrome "feature" mutes audio from many browser games and interactive
audiovisual websites, offering no indication that audio is muted, and no way
for the user to restore the audio.

By trying to silence autoplaying video ads, they have thrown the baby out with
the bathwater (except for certain specially whitelisted domains, like
youtube).

------
lucaspottersky
isn't the "Allow website to send Notifications" prompt on 99% of mainstream
websites irritating enough?

~~~
LoSboccacc
That’s because the api is badly defined, the javascript call to ask for
notification is syncronous so the browser need that annoying blocking popup
insteas of something less invasive like the popup notification

~~~
Klathmon
The javascript call to request notification permissions is async (returning a
promise in newer browsers, callback in older ones).

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/Notificatio...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/Notification/requestPermission)

------
amelius
Since JavaScript can generate moving imagery, and animated GIFs can as well,
the only sensible thing is to consider the video as something conceptually
different from audio. I wouldn't mind if they _always_ allow videos to play,
_except_ I want full control over the audio at all times.

------
captainbland
Is MySpace going to make a comeback here or what?

