
New autoplay policy in Chrome - AndersSandvik
https://blog.google/products/chrome/improving-autoplay-chrome/
======
koolba
> As you browse the web, that list changes as Chrome learns and enables
> autoplay on sites where you play media with sound during most of your
> visits, and disables it on sites where you don’t. This way, Chrome gives you
> a personalized, predictable browsing experience.

Predictable in a user application is the same result from the same action
every time. UX changing based on opaque logic and heuristics is anything but
predictable.

~~~
rtpg
yeah, this seems like such an intense thing to do

My bet is that they did this to not break Youtube. I mean it makes sense (you
don't want video sites to not work) but it's also such a hacky sort of thing

I don't get why they couldn't make this a permission thing like a mic. Ask the
website to allow autoplay.

~~~
Aardwolf
> My bet is that they did this to not break Youtube.

Which is fine to me. If I go to a website specifically for videos, I want it
to autoplay, having to press play is a pointless action.

If I go to a website to read articles, I do _not_ want autoplay, and I
_definitely_ don't want the video to even follow me around as a tiny minimized
window when I scroll down and yes I _will_ close the tab or press back pretty
quick if that happens (as I come to the realization the effort to read this
article is not worth the gain and realize that I probably was procrastinating
anyway to end up on that article in the first place so should do something
more productive). If it's interesting enough I will play the video myself,
preferably with full control of its time slider myself and preferably without
it auto-starting an unrelated different video after this one was done.

~~~
digi_owl
I may go there to view a video, but that does not mean i want it to start
playing the moment the page starts loading.

~~~
cdancette
that's why it's learning from your actions

~~~
maskros
Not the same thing, if going by the article. If I eventually play all the
videos, at my own leasure, it will still learn that I play the videos and
start playing immediately when the page loads.

------
sanxiyn
> Chrome does this by learning your preferences... This way, Chrome gives you
> a personalized, predictable browsing experience.

In my experience, "learning" and "predictable" do not go together.

~~~
always_good
Reminds me of fuzzy matching systems like Alfred that will try to learn which
key combos you use to launch each app instead of trying to offer you
predictability.

But "fi<enter>" never launches Firefox anymore because of that one time you
accidentally launched Finder instead. And since you keep accidentally
launching Finder that way, it never learns that you want Firefox.

So you try "f<enter>" but you accidentally launch Flux. And because you keep
forgetting it thinks "f" = Flux, it always launches Flux.

So you have to use "fir<enter>" to launch Firefox. But "fire<enter>" somehow
launches Firewatch, a game you forgot you had installed on your laptop.

It's the most obnoxious system ever where each additional keystroke reorders
the entire fuzzy result list in the name of "learning." It really is the
opposite of predictable.

~~~
07d046
And then there's Chrome, where you can start typing something in the URL bar,
and it comes up with some results immediately, but in the milliseconds before
you select a result it changes to something "better" so you go to the page
instead. Infuriating.

~~~
asmosoinio
I have pretty much the opposite anecdote: to me the Chrome URL bar is a magic
component that finds any of the tickets I've lately worked on (from three
different ticketing systems) with typing a few words/characters, knows that
"n" is HN etc, "g" takes me to gmail.com etc. And all without any effort to
manually teach it.

Google Spreadsheets is where it often fails to work perfectly - hard to get it
to take me to the spreadsheets homepage if I don't remember exactly which
sheet I want to open.

~~~
madeofpalk
Honestly, this has been the most annoying part of agency work for me. Every
three months I work in a different github repo, so I constantly need to
forcefully make it relearn what gi+down-arrow means

------
gwbas1c
I think it would be better to just disable autoplay on all websites, and then
let me manually enable it.

I pretty much continue to install Adblock so I can kill the auto-play elements
on websites that just should not autoplay.

~~~
billysielu
100% agree.

------
nightcracker
> This way, Chrome gives you a personalized, predictable browsing experience.

> predictable

What could possibly be more predictable than disabling autoplay altogether?

Google says it enabled autoplay for 'over 1000 sites', but we all know Google
only cares about one thing and that is playing more ads on YouTube.

~~~
Gaelan
Cynicism aside, YouTube is a typical example of a good use for autoplay. A
user clicking a link to YT almost always wants to watch the video.
"Predictable" probably wasn't the right word for them to use, but I think this
is a reasonable move by Google.

~~~
zaarn
I don't want YouTube to autoplay, most of the time, I'm opening a lot of YT
tabs at once and sometimes I need to seek out a specific one I am interested
in most.

It would be much nicer if the various plugins I use to control that behaviour
wouldn't stop working every 4 months due to another youtube redesign (whether
in UI or Backend on the Client).

~~~
ripdog
Firefox does this by default. Background tabs do not autoplay, but the
foreground tab does.

~~~
Macha
Huh, I thought this was a behaviour YouTube/twitch did manually as it doesn't
seem 100% reliable on news sites.

------
mikob
This broke my accessibility extension for Chrome that lets users control the
browser with their voice instead of hands.

Since voice isn't counted as a "gesture" the user can't say "play" to start a
a video.

It's not just autoplay it's any sort of dynamic (js initiated) playing of
media.

~~~
mounirlamouri
Hey, would you mind sharing the extension you are using? This should not
happen and I would like to help fixing it.

~~~
mikob
Curious why you say it should not happen? Do you mean technically -- if so,
how?

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lipsurf/lnnmjmalak...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lipsurf/lnnmjmalakahagblkkcnjkoaihlfglon)

I added an ugly workaround, a slide to the tutorial that asks users to go into
their flags and allow autoplay without any gestures. Chrome extensions should
have better privileges for playing videos, fullscreening etc. IMO but it all
needs to be hacked around limiting extensions.

------
ledjon
I think the real rub here is that the developer of the website doesn’t know if
Autoplay is going to work or not. From what i read on this the site doesn’t
not get access to any information on if Autoplay did work or is going to work.
For many business type of applications this is critical as being as low
friction as possible is very important. Autoplay for a web conference, for
example, makes perfect sense. But the JavaScript developer doesn’t know if
this event failed or worked. Plus what if you aren’t in active development on
your product that relies on this? You have to go modify functionality that has
been perfectly fine for years.

I also don’t like how quick google is to make such unilateral changes and just
boom there they are in production on the web. Good luck Keeping your site
browser agnostic. The but ticket for this feature even advised that site
developers check to see if the browser is chrome first and then do different
logic. What a mess.

------
askvictor
Can we find this auto-generated list of enabled/disabled sites anywhere? Can
it be edited manually? Will Chrome notify why a particular site did/didn't
auto-play a video?

I like Inbox's recent behaviour that explains why it deems a particular email
important - it would be good if this sort of explanation was more prevalent
with publicly-available ML systems.

~~~
asddddd
Seems to be this blob:
[https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/b67034891a23389825...](https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/b67034891a2338982544a9c524ef1394803f985d/chrome/browser/resources/media/mei_preload/preloaded_data.pb)

~~~
askvictor
Gah. A blob with no info about it.

Looking a little further, it appears to be a ProtocolBuffer file, but would a
bit of documentation hurt?

~~~
tgsovlerkhgsel
An early version of the proto I found is:

[https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/5d90890...](https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/5d9089080ea5fb0e348bb28f7a396d1181476f0f/chrome/browser/media/media_engagement_preload.proto)

So the proto is a red herring, it's basically just a container for a blob in
some other format.

[https://chromium-
review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/80...](https://chromium-
review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/803994) contains a lot of related
files, including [https://chromium-
review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/80...](https://chromium-
review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/803994/9/tools/media_engagement_preload/make_dafsa.py)
which explains the format.

I'm surprised that there isn't a plain text version of the list checked in
somewhere, but maybe I just missed it.

------
potench
Preroll (IMA3) integration with an HTML5 video player is a really tricky dance
when you’re trying to support mobile/desktop browsers with a resilient and
consistent video player experience. Autoplay has been one of the most
difficult differences to manage across browsers.

There’s no browser api that tells you if autoplay is supported, and you won’t
get meaningful errors when you try to autoplay when you can’t.

Ultimately the right solution is to just-don’t-autoplay-ever, but it’s a hard
sell when you see a 20-40% drop in VOD begins when you remove autoplay.

I’m not sure how to even approach Chrome deciding to autoplay “sometimes”. You
have to tell the video player to autoplay a video a.m3u8, but swap that out
for preroll.m3u8 before you know if any of it is going to work at all. If it
fails, you’re gonna see weird errors in IMA3, or at the video player level,
none of which really help you decide how to gracefully handle the situation.

So yeah, if you have client-side preroll, just don’t autoplay I guess.

~~~
Jaruzel
> Ultimately the right solution is to just-don’t-autoplay-ever, but it’s a
> hard sell when you see a 20-40% drop in VOD begins when you remove autoplay.

Which tells me that with autoplay enabled, 20-40% of people are probably
clicking 'stop' just after the video starts playing, so aren't watching your
content anyway.

~~~
potench
You’d need to track your minutes watched per video to see if there’s a drop. I
threw an in-exact percentage out as an example, but from what I recall on my
last project with video, minutes watched per video went up, not down.
Autopilot features work better than you would think...

------
curt15
>s you browse the web, that list changes as Chrome learns and enables autoplay
on sites where you play media with sound during most of your visits, and
disables it on sites where you don’t.

What about disabling autoplay even without sound? Unwanted autoplay videos
burn through battery even while muted.

~~~
rspeer
They're just modernizing the idea of a GIF. The GIF format was used long after
it should have been obsolete, because despite its limitations, it had the key
advantage of providing simple, silent animations that autoplay.

Now a lot of "GIFs" aren't in GIF format, they're videos with no sound, and
that makes a lot of sense because it's 2018 and we've learned some things
about compression and video since 1987.

If silent videos didn't autoplay consistently, people would keep using actual
GIFs, using way more bandwidth for the same purpose.

~~~
jerrre
you could also block GIFs from animating by default

------
crystaln
The best way to improve autoplay is to disable it.

chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy

~~~
crystaln
Interesting. Setting this to "Document user activation required" eliminated
all autoplay for me.

~~~
taternuts
It seems to work intermittently for me at best. Bloomberg is a notable
(notably annoying) example that not only autoplays (though at least without
sound) but highjacks your first click on the video (usually trying to pause
it) and enables sound instead.

~~~
crystaln
Hmm. Actually it seems to be less effective this week than in the past.

------
frozenlettuce
In other words: "If you browse in incognito, you will be punished with
annoying videos" It is in the same line with FB's "your experience will be
worse if you choose to delete your data"

------
rocqua
Why does this system 'learn'. I wouldn't mind a prompt much like desktop-
notifications are now. Ask me if a site can auto-play.

If google want this on-by-default on youtube, I wouldn't mind. As an upside,
this would make it obvious they favor their own product.

~~~
jasonkostempski
A site-wide setting isn't good enough, every media element needs to require
user action. It is ridiculous that isn't a working option, Chrome can't be
taken seriously as a user agent.

------
khedoros1
On a 1366x768 screen, that blog was painful to read. The header and top menu
stuff take up about the top 1/4 of the window (and only folds away near the
bottom of the page), and the "related articles" takes the bottom 1/4\.
Clicking the button to hide related helped some.

My autoplay desires are pretty simple. If the site's Youtube, Vimeo, or
another site that exists purely for video, I expect videos to autoplay. It'll
annoy me anywhere else. I'd be fine with a whitelist. What I like the least
about their new implementation is that the behavior of the browser will change
on its own. I don't like my software trying to predict me or changing its
behavior without an explicit command to do so.

~~~
kalleboo
Reader mode (in Safari or Firefox) removes all the cruft

------
kodablah
> 1,000 sites where we see that the highest percentage of visitors play media
> with sound

I hate this shit just like I hate their ads program. Where're all the net
neutrality proponents when the popular browser vendor is the offender?

------
panic
Bret Victor's response:
[https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/993167096992288771](https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/993167096992288771)

~~~
geofft
I genuinely do not understand the artist in the replies who says this has
destroyed their work. Can't the website require you to click/tap once to start
its thing, without negative impact? I feel like I must be missing something.
(There's a mention about not updating code for existing work, which might be
it?)

~~~
_neil
The artist in question has hundreds of pieces of work, many of which he may
not have easy (if any) access to anymore. It would take a non-trivial amount
of work to fix.

But I think he’s also expressing doubt about creating art/work on the web in
the future because of things like this.

~~~
jasonkostempski
It only because of user hostile choices made by browser vendors that it was
ever a viable option to begin with and it was a bad bet to think it would
last, although Google seems to be doing anything they can to keep things the
way they are without directly saying "we'd rather you not be able to stop all
media because our business model is to get in your face". No one deserves the
unrestrained ability to enter your home and interrupt you in the name of
commerce, entertainment, art, or anything else, except maybe emergency.

------
chaostheory
> Chrome does this by learning your preferences. If you don’t have browsing
> history, Chrome allows autoplay for over 1,000 sites where we see that the
> highest percentage of visitors play media with sound. As you browse the web,
> that list changes as Chrome learns and enables autoplay on sites where you
> play media with sound during most of your visits, and disables it on sites
> where you don’t.

Not good enough. I can't even disable autoplay using Chrome's configuration.
It doesn't work... but it works on FireFox.

------
Jyaif
accurate summary: If you don’t have browsing history, Chrome allows autoplay
for over 1,000 sites where we see that the highest percentage of visitors play
media with sound. As you browse the web, that list changes as Chrome learns.

~~~
flukus
Not that this would be surprising, but does that mean chrome is collecting
user data?

~~~
Sylos
When you use Chrome Sync, Google gathers and evaluates your entire browsing
history.

You can forego it by enabling end-to-end-encryption, but since they require a
second password for that, the percentage of Chrome Sync users who use this, is
probably close to 0%.

------
gumby
I just gave up and basically always have the sound off. I occasionally turn up
the volume manually for something specific.

Unfortunately this does nothing for moving images (moving ads).

------
tokyodude
I'm curious if I go to 1000 youtube pages and close in 6 seconds if Chrome
will stop autoplay on youtube

------
gcb0
summary: google allow 800 of the international youtube domains to autoplay,
plus some 200 other publishers to pretend they are neutral.

~~~
Amelorate
My interpretation of the article was that chrome ships with a blocklist of
websites that have annoying autoplay features, but will automatically remove
websites from that blocklist that you usually start by playing their videos,
and automatically adds websites to the blocklist if the first thing you do is
pause the video.

Youtube probably is not on the blocklist, but it will add youtube to your
personal blocklist if you always pause the videos.

~~~
makomk
Other way around, as I understand it - they have a whitelist of sites that are
allowed to play audio without interaction, everything else is blocked by
default. (This is implemented in a way that completely breaks audio in a bunch
of older web-based games and interactive audio experiences, too.)

------
cshenton
If this had been communicated as "Improving Autoplay Blocking in Chrome" I
think it would have been better received. Because that's just what it is.

Instead I had a sort of loss aversion based reaction where I think now some
things will autoplay that didn't before, but in fact fewer things will
autoplay full stop.

------
zkms
Why is there no way to whitelist an arbitrary website in my browser with this
new scheme?
[http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901](http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901) is
broken with the latest Chrome.

------
aaronbrethorst
...Or you can just use Safari, which refuses to auto play any video with an
audio track.

------
JepZ
I wonder how much I need to know to predict the outcome for a certain website
and how they _see_ what the highest percentage of visitors does.

Do they see through Google Analytics or do they send my behavior to their
servers when I am using Chrome?

------
zeusk
[https://imgur.com/a/QDbVHwH](https://imgur.com/a/QDbVHwH)

I'm surprised Google's documentation is not designed with readability in mind.

------
barrystaes
I'm happy to see that many people here already suggested that this behaviour
is NOT PREDICTABLE. In my view thats a must for any device or tool, including
software/computers.

------
benbro
I couldn't find a way to detect autoplay failure when using the YouTube iframe
API. We can catch promise failure when using a normal video element.
[https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-
policy-changes#best-practices)

------
mholt
Until autoplay can accurately detect whether I am in a setting where battery
drain and sound is acceptable, I will still keep it off.

------
profalseidol
With FF as my browser and a bookmark toolbar. About only 40% is allotted to
showing the actual content.

------
abzolv
"In fact, in Chrome a significant number of autoplays are paused, muted, or
have their tab closed within six seconds by people who don’t want them."

How would they know that without tracking and centrally recording your
autoplay actions in Chrome?

~~~
mborch
From Google Analytics.

------
amelius
The only thing I want is to turn off sound from the start, in my browser at
work.

(Unfortunately, the PulseAudio volume control doesn't show Chrome in its
"applications" tab before it has played a sound.)

~~~
cszerzo
I don't know if that is possible, but you can mute individual web pages
(seemingly based on domain name) and they will stay muted until you say
otherwise. Works for me pretty well.

------
emodendroket
I'd rather just see an explicit white list based on user input.

------
m-p-3
If the heuristics are a good as the Android direct-share menu (which suggest
contacts I've never talked to..), I'm not very confident it will be a success.

------
millstone
This site is quite broken in Safari, with the "related articles" bar drifting
up as you scroll down.

------
dandare
Maybe I am not the target group but I can not think of a single website with
autoplay video w sound.

What am I missing?

~~~
mdrzn
More news websites autoplay videos than I'd like to see.

------
kmfrk
I wish we could just code up a permission prompt like you have for microphone
and geo access.

------
skate22
Autoplay is so annoying. Ive stopped using certain sites that enable it by
default

------
gesman
Updated "being eaten" preferences for sheeps from wolf.

Wolf only does this by learning sheep' preferences.

Of course keeping sheeps happy is wolf's first priority.

------
antoineMoPa
With that huge `position:fixed` header and footer, only 1/3 of my chromebook's
screen height is actually displaying text from that page.

------
geofft
The title looks editorialized - can the scare quotes be removed? They don't
seem to be in the original.

~~~
thefifthsetpin
The original title is also editorialized, just in the other direction. "New
autoplay policy in Chrome" sounds reasonably neutral to me.

~~~
dang
Ok, we've switched to that. Thanks!

------
megaman22
How about an option to just turn the damn things off all the time? Video
should never play until I tell it to.

------
masterleep
How are HTML5 games supposed to deal with this? They don't really have media
that you click on.

~~~
tokyodude
you add a "click to start" button

------
nukeop
This is yet another attempt by Google to leverage their browser market
hegemony against other publishers. Who wants to bet that Youtube will have
autoplay enabled by default in all cases, while other ad providers will have
theirs disabled?

------
caiob
This reminds me so much of “Gryzzl” on Parks and Rec.

“We just want to learn everything about you, collect all your data and watch
everything you do”

------
dredmorbius
Most of the word I'd like to use doesn't fly here.

But what part of "No, never" does Google not understand?

Nuke Chrome, Android, Youtube, and Web search.

------
Canada
Way to defend Net Neutrality there, by picking which sites are allowed to have
certain capabilities.

------
omarforgotpwd
It catches half of unintended auto plays? So basically Google is rolling with
a system that will still annoy you sometimes because that’s what’s best for
their advertisement driven bottom line. The faster and more seamlessly ads can
get played, the more money google makes.

