
Auto-Play Policy Changes for macOS - stablemap
https://webkit.org/blog/7734/auto-play-policy-changes-for-macos/
======
dgfgfdagasdfgfa
Thank god.

This has made visiting news websites—say, your local fox channel—nearly
unbearable, between the auto-playing ads and content.

I can't imagine how people with small bandwidth go to sites these days without
an ad blocker.

~~~
rhizome
It's the `blink` tag of the 21st century.

~~~
mnm1
21st century? This has been an issue for about two decades--since browsers
first gained the ability to play sound--going well back to the '90's.

~~~
mmagin
Ah, auto-play MIDI files!

------
makecheck
We're still talking about an environment that can execute practically any
code. I'm sure the next thing advertisers will do is download 100 static
images and animate them with scripts.

~~~
dawnerd
Alternately they've overlay a transparent play button over the entire pay so
the moment you click it counts as a "user action" and the video plays. Seen it
happen on a few sites. They combine it with something like forbes uses with a
"quote of the day" interstitial.

~~~
askvictor
Or an opaque overlay with ' click here to read article' that also triggers the
video

------
TheAceOfHearts
This is a very user-friendly feature, kudos to Apple for making the change. I
hope other browsers follow in their steps.

I think every time I've encountered a website that autoplays video, it's been
an annoyance. But maybe I haven't considered the topic with enough depth, what
are examples of legitimate use-cases for autoplay video?

~~~
azmenak
We use keyboard controls in our app (vidhub.co) to control media, looks like a
Safari 11 user will no longer be able to just hit a key to start a video if
Safari's "automatic inference engine" chooses to block us.

~~~
jlarocco
If it were up to me, they'd remove that ability altogether. Websites that
screw with the keyboard are a huge pet peeve of mine.

------
coldpie
Firefox has had it for a while at media.autoplay.enabled. Unfortunately, like
this article notes, this arguably breaks web standards and some websites
behave poorly as a result. YouTube requires you to stop the not-yet-started
video and then start it again to get it to play. And Google Play Music just
straight up doesn't work. Hopefully Apple publicizing this will cause website
devs to support it better, and it can be presented to the user as a legitimate
option instead of a hack.

------
mschuster91
On one side, I can certainly understand why Apple went with this, even if it
drives me nuts that Safari@iOS can't do inline play at all (because it
prevents nice artistic stuff using a canvas overlaid over a video element, for
example), even if the play action is user-initiated.

On the other hand it takes away a LOT of flexibility - seriously, I don't want
to do 50MB GIFs for animated background or weird JS trickery when I can use a
2MB video for the same effect.

~~~
jernoble
> ...it drives me nuts that Safari@iOS can't do inline play at all...

Safari on iOS can now do inline playback! Just add a "playsinline" attribute
to your <video> element: [https://webkit.org/blog/6784/new-video-policies-for-
ios/](https://webkit.org/blog/6784/new-video-policies-for-ios/)

~~~
dhritzkiv
Also make sure to remove the audio track!

------
gumby
A shame they don't block silent view too. Motion is a distraction (which is
why advertisers use it, as if being distracted was what I wanted).

This is why I mourned the death of Flash. Not installing flash made the web a
much better place.

------
lallysingh
Does this include animated gif?

If yes: then it's annoying.

If no: annoying ads turn into animated gifs.

~~~
sp332
If the video does not have an audio track, it seems that it will be allowed.
However, as you note, animated gifs are still pretty annoying and I think it
would be nice if they were click-to-play as well.

~~~
panopticon
> However, as you note, animated gifs are still pretty annoying

I think that comment actually says disabling autoplay on animated gifs would
be annoying.

~~~
laythea
I think the comment was saying 2 things: its bad because we loose GIF auto
play facility and its bad because we will still have ads via GIFs.

So basically, its a no win move for the consumer.

However, my response would be to that would be: yes its bad if so, and if not,
users can hopefully "throttle" its impact on our experience. IE. I would
expect that the browser controls the parameters in which the GIF is "played"
to maximize performance, or to suit user preference. E.g. Max number of
frames, GIF size, looping etc

------
filleokus
How will this effect video backgrounds like Airbnb used to have?

~~~
ohazi
I hope it breaks them. What a spectacular waste of bandwidth and energy.

~~~
dhritzkiv
Regarding bandwidth… what if the video is efficiently encoded to less than the
file size of a high-quality PNG/JPEG (assuming the image was not optimized
itself)?

Artifacts in heavily compressed video files are often more acceptable than
artefacts in highly compressed still JPEGs, IMO.

~~~
minikites
Perhaps the correct answer is to have a solid color or similarly simple
background. Aids in readability too.

------
ryanbertrand
How does this affect YouTube, Twitch, Netflix?

~~~
tuxracer
They still have a "Play" button, no? It's possible there may be some whitelist
as well.

~~~
M4v3R
FTA:

> Safari 11 also gives users control over which websites are allowed to auto-
> play video and audio by opening Safari’s new “Websites” preferences pane, or
> through the “Settings for This Website…” option in the Safari menu

~~~
tuxracer
Right you have a way to manually whitelist sites on your own as well. But it
wouldn't surprise me if that whitelist came preloaded with a number of legit
video sites (netflix, youtube, etc...)

------
cgtyoder
Any word on when this will get rolled out?

