
Google Chrome to stop autoplaying content with sound - piyushgupta27
https://venturebeat.com/2017/09/14/chrome-will-no-longer-autoplay-content-with-sound-in-january-2018/
======
k3oni
Auto-playing crap bugs the hell out of me. Some news sites do it as well even
when you go and Pause the player, it will go on and play ahead after a few
seconds.

Started using "Disable HTML5 Autoplay"[1] extension in Chrome and works great.
I wish every browser would stop sound and video by default until i hit Play or
have a setting for that.

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-
html5-auto...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-
html5-autoplay/efdhoaajjjgckpbkoglidkeendpkolai?hl=en)

~~~
dguaraglia
The latest craziness is "news" websites that have an autoplay video + an
autoplay ad, and their actual content is just another video, because
apparently reading 10 lines of text is harder than sitting through a two
minute slideshow with the same ten lines of text and some pretty pictures.
It's getting ridiculous.

~~~
ehsankia
I don't think it's a simple problem though. I want my videos on Youtube,
Twitch and other similar sites to auto play, without having to click it
manually every single time. We get into a whitelist/blacklist situation. The
best way is to stick to one way, and allow users to fully unblock a site.
Right now, it auto plays but you can fully blacklist a whole domain. I could
also see it as everything is blocked and you whitelist Youtube. Maybe even
automatically does it if you click play on a few videos.

~~~
Ajedi32
> everything is blocked and you whitelist Youtube. Maybe even automatically
> does it if you click play on a few videos

That's basically what they're doing:
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJ...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJLg14Ogf-
ekAFNymAJoU/edit)

~~~
fish_fan
Is there anyway to wipe the whitelist?

------
MBCook
> The content is muted, or does not include any audio (video only)

Sigh. So no surprise audio but nothing to stop the trend of silent video ads
or (even worse) muted live TV?

How about NO auto playing live video or files over 250k? Don't waste my
bandwidth streaming stuff I'm not trying to watch.

~~~
chickenfries
This would break using mp4s as "gifs" which is a pretty common practice these
days. Taking away these features might cause people to go back to actual gifs
which would be terrible... so I can understand why they want to leave this
loophole open.

I would like the idea of having a user configured limit for autoplaying gifs
though...

~~~
MBCook
That's why I put the 250kb number in. Maybe it should be higher. Maybe limit
the dimensions.

But for the love of god don't waste my bandwidth on streaming video.

~~~
jedberg
If you set any arbitrary number, the ad networks will simply report that
number as the size, or chunk the video into that size and make the page keep
requesting small video after small video.

~~~
TomMarius
The browser could just cut off the network for the site until you click
"approve".

------
CM30
I'm probably missing something here, but the document says that media autoplay
is allowed if visitors keep visiting the site and interacting with the video
player:

> The MEI score will be computed as is: > If number_of_visits < 5: > Return 0
> > Else > Return number_significant_playback / number_of_visits

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJ...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJLg14Ogf-
ekAFNymAJoU/edit#heading=h.7efd85kwebui)

Doesn't that mean some of the worst sites affected by this might still manage
to get videos and sound files autoplaying?

Because if you go to a news site, it's quite likely you may end up watching a
video about the story.

But at the same time... you don't want the background ads to automatically
play, nor do you want said video playing by default on return visits.

Yet this system seems like it may allow the latter two things to happen.

~~~
jessriedel
Yea, it seems like site-specific permission settings are the way on this. The
"Do you want to share your location with this website?" check seems to work
fairly well. I think "Do you want to allow videos with sound to autoplay?"
would too.

~~~
Klathmon
You have to be very careful with that though.

Already it seems that 75%+ of news sites ask me to show notifications, and the
alerts alone asking for it are getting annoying.

I'd be even more upset if every site now had to ask for permission to do all
kinds of things (Do you want to allow sound? Do you want to allow cookies? Do
you want to allow video?)

I don't know the answer on how to deal with this stuff, but I don't think
putting everything behind requests to the user is a good option (and clearly
just allowing everything is a bad idea as well).

~~~
jessriedel
I agree. One way to ameliorate this problem is to only allow sites to even
_ask_ for permission to autoplay content with sound if the user has manually
played a video a few times in the past.

More generally, you can set permission settings to be very conservative by
default and not allow sites to bother the user with permissions until the user
has interacted positively with the site several times in the past. Here,
"positively" could be a fairly fuzzy rule of thumb depending on the global
trustworthiness of the site and the sensitivity of the permissions requested.

~~~
Klathmon
That is a bad idea from my point of view.

Whatever the solution is, it should be consistent and easily knowable by the
average user.

How would a website tell a user to enable auto-playing video for a website
that they want it for (for example, how would youtube tell users to enable
that)? How would the user even understand that this website won't work
correctly for them but it works fine for their friends/family/other-browsers?

I've made a web-app that uses camera access, and the web audio API. Without
either of them, the app is 100% useless, so locking those behind a permission
that won't even show up until the user has been there for a while completely
kills that app.

While I understand you are only talking about auto-playing video, the point
still stands IMO. Trying to "guess" what the user wants is wrong when it comes
to enabling/disabling features.

~~~
jessriedel
Your concerns are definitely valid, but note that every time the Chrome team
chooses a browser default, or doesn't include a permission setting for every
possible ability, they are guessing what the user wants. And these guesses
will not be the same made by other browsers, so the user may still be confused
why something works for their friends but not them. "Smart permissions" seem
strictly better to me than allowing autoplay ads or no autoplay youtube, and
reducing user frustration may just require ad-hoc tricks, e.g., filling the
bank spot of a non-auto-played video with a permission dialog box. Likewise,
using global trustworthiness information about a website could greatly improve
guesses.

------
danso
Autoplay seems to be something universally reviled and yet the trend seemed to
be that enough people tolerated it to make advertisers and sites double down
on it:
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/19/facebook-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/19/facebook-
users-complain-autoplaying-videos-sound-how-to-turn-it-off)

> _During Facebook’s announcement of the feature in February, product manager
> Dana Sittler and engineering manager Alex Li said: “As people watch more
> video on phones, they’ve come to expect sound when the volume on their
> device is turned on.”_

> *"After testing sound on in News Feed and hearing positive feedback, we’re
> slowly bringing it to more people.”

Likely Chrome's feature won't affect FB given how much FB is on mobile but I'm
interested in how media sites, such as CNN, will be impacted. Seems like
they've become dependent on throwing up an annoying newscast video (with post-
roll ads) for every article. Many times unrelated.

~~~
drewg123
I've pretty much stopped going to CNN because of this. I have managed to block
a lot of this video by using privacy badger and blocking the underlying CDNs
where it is played from. However, I've never been able to block CNN
effectively, so I've just given up on them.

~~~
lamontcg
Newsweek's autoplay is literally cancer. I've got the disable HTML5 autoplay,
but the newsweek site is so aggressive about autoplaying that it bugs out the
browser.

~~~
drewg123
The "just read" chrome extension seems to work pretty well at stopping media
playback for Newsweek.

------
outsidetheparty
It's a start. Allowing users to disable autoplay altogether would be better,
but shutting down the audio is better than nothing.

It's a shame that browsers increasingly have to actively defend against
website behavior, instead of just being tools for displaying those websites;
but, well, here we are.

~~~
msla
Autoplay music was in for a while, went out, then came back in, from what I
recall: Back in the 1990s, it was MIDI files on the stereotypical Geocities
page, or completely hand-made pages, and that went out in a massive design
backlash against those kinds of sites.

Now, it's coming back in the form of autoplay video on news sites, for
example, which would have been impossible in the dial-up era.

So this isn't a new thing, it's an old one that's come back. Annoying people
have always been annoying.

~~~
wlesieutre
>Annoying people have always been annoying.

But it increases engagement!!!

I'm happy to see these changes coming.

~~~
msla
Ad tech is indistinguishable from toddlers who haven't learned the difference
between good attention and bad attention.

~~~
wlesieutre
Is not that they haven't learned, it's that even if you're pissed at an
advertisement or whatever other annoying thing they did, at least you're
looking at it. And will probably remember it. That's what's important!

~~~
danso
I agree that it's possible that annoying ads do work for advertisers. Just
like super-expensive Super Bowl ads bring in a good return on investment even
if I think I already like Coca-Cola enough to not need to see another
commercial. But the ads could be both beneficial for one party (the
advertiser, and/or the brand) while being hugely terrible for the host. I'm a
news junkie but I actively do not go to CNN.com. Not just I don't visit its
front page, but will just ignore any content that's being shared from that
domain because I know the ad/video-junk consistently ruins my ability to
consume (and enjoy) the content, no matter how great or important it might be.

------
KyleBerezin
Look at this headline, "Chrome Will Soon Block Autoplay Videos With
Sound—Here's Why You Should Be Worried" [1] What a brazen attempt at fear-
mongering so they can protect their ability to be more ad-intrusive than porn
websites.

[1] [http://gizmodo.com/chrome-will-soon-block-autoplay-videos-
wi...](http://gizmodo.com/chrome-will-soon-block-autoplay-videos-with-sound-
heres-1814207806)

~~~
conductr
Meanwhile the autoplaying video ad with sound on that page has no
pause/stop/mute controls. Exactly why "Pushing advertisers to create a better
browsing experience seems like it’s good for everyone" will never work unless
browsers draw some lines

------
camus2
I'm not sure why all these websites decided that auto-playing video is a good
thing. It's annoying as hell. I click on an article for reading, I'm not
clicking on a youtube playlist.

The latest craze among web designers being videos that follow the reader even
when they are scrolling down the page! Enough!

Can we have a designer here explaining why they do this? If it's about
engagement, i'm not going back to your website if you do that to me once.

~~~
exodust
If the video follows you down the page in a paused state, with thumbnail and
"play" icon, would this be okay?

The video that follows you down the page is trying to help you, not annoy you.
It gives you the chance to read the article while having the vision there too.
It's only a problem if the video autoplays, which unfortunately is all of the
time on all sites that do this.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> If the video follows you down the page in a paused state, with thumbnail and
> "play" icon, would this be okay?

Absolutely not. If the video is useful content, put it front and center, and
let the user hit "play" on it; if they scroll it away, accept that they don't
want it. If it's unrelated content (as with the thousands of "news" sites that
want to autoplay an unrelated "hey look at this completely unrelated garbage"
video), put it under a "related stories" column or similar, and stop making it
jump around the page to draw attention. The user is already on the page they
wanted, their attention is exactly where they want it to be, and your job is
to serve them what they want, not what _you_ want.

"Engagement" might be easy to measure (hey look, if we pester the hell out of
users we get a few more users who accidentally watched the video), but the
much better metric for long-term sustainability is "how many users love your
site and think 'this is awesome'".

------
j_s
Devil's advocate / counterpoint:

[https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/908675882587484160](https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/908675882587484160)

 _My complaint here is that Google is making things worse for media /game
pages by making life good for people reading web content proper_

~~~
koonsolo
And this one: "What's interesting here is how what this really demonstrates is
that Flash really was exactly what we wanted".

With HTML5, who didn't see annoying JavaScript popups and autoplay videos
coming? Seriously.

If you think about the web, think about 2 things: 1\. Text content 2\.
Multimedia content

People complaining about Flash always used arguments for nr 1.

For me, I want my text content to be really static text content, and my
multimedia content to be boxed-in multimedia. HTML4 and Flash were good at
that. Now you have a mix of both: 1\. Text content with annoying interactions
2\. Crippled multimedia content (think about the terrible way iOS handles
audio for HTML5 games. Expect this in all browsers soon).

~~~
sosborn
Annoying stuff is always annoying, but the major complaints about flash were
centered on security holes and excessive CPU utilization.

~~~
koonsolo
Sure, I'm willing to accept that, including that Flash is not a web standard.

But another solution might have been to make a Flash web standard, with open
implementations, instead of HTML5.

This is really an architectural choice that was made, not so much the blocking
of a plugin.

They chose to integrate all in 1 big pile, instead of keeping web content and
multimedia separate. And now you end up with a washed out version of both.

------
stablemap
This will be in Safari 11 too: [https://webkit.org/blog/7734/auto-play-policy-
changes-for-ma...](https://webkit.org/blog/7734/auto-play-policy-changes-for-
macos/)

~~~
javajocky
In Safari it auto-blocks ALL video, not just with sound.

~~~
amiga-workbench
Isn't that only on mobile? I've had to push back on looping video backgrounds
from designers far too many times to count.

------
ilamont
It's a war for attention, and ultimately, money. If sites can't autoplay video
with sound, they'll switch to more of the junk videos that make it onto
Facebook (muted by default, I believe), which include giant captions or other
distracting elements.

------
amelius
As much as I like this idea, I'm sure that this will also cause problems in
certain cases.

Therefore, I'd like to see per-website "capability settings", just like you
can allow smartphone-apps to access your microphone, camera, et cetera. And an
API for websites to determine which capabilities they have, and an API to
request the browser to ask the user to add a capability.

~~~
benjaminjackman
With an always veto by default option, similar to the way pop up windows are
blocked / handled. I much prefer seeing the little red x over a window icon in
the location bar that I can click on in my own time than the modal drop down
"this site wants to send you notifications" thing that I have to deal with
right away, especially since I am always going to say 'no thanks' to the
notifications and almost certainly autoplay as well.

------
Ajedi32
Technical details: [https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/audio-
video/auto...](https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/audio-
video/autoplay)

------
katastic
Gizmodo is running an article about how THIS is the dangerous thing Google
that will destroy the web.

[http://gizmodo.com/chrome-will-soon-block-autoplay-videos-
wi...](http://gizmodo.com/chrome-will-soon-block-autoplay-videos-with-sound-
heres-1814207806)

I can't stop laughing.

------
polygot
What about YouTube? I'm sure they'll add an exception for it, but it
technically does classify as automatically playing a video when you click on a
link.

~~~
exodust
Just allow it for youtube, while keeping everything else blocked. Whitelisting
is the best option because there aren't that many websites primarily about
playing video. Nobody goes to Youtube for other activities. Clicking a video
link means you intend watching.

News websites are the worst. Clicking a news article means I want to read the
article, not watch a video. If I want to watch the video on a news website
(rare) I will press play. If they autoplay videos, I send them nasty angry
feedback and don't return if I can help it.

~~~
franga2000
Whitelisting is about the worst thing you could do. It makes any kind of
competition and therefore inovation on the web impossible and under the
vendor's control. Simply ask the user to allow autoplay, same as you would
with mic or camera permissions.

------
makecheck
This must be fixed long-term by segregating browser capabilities into tiers
that are clearly visible to the user, and _severely_ limiting defaults on data
size, compute time, etc. especially when your site claims to belong in the
"simple web site" tier. In other words, unless _the user_ thinks it makes
sense for you to download lots of data and do complex things, _you can 't_.

------
tim333
Yay! Thank goodness. I've got 3 different extensions trying to achieve that to
some extent (Stop HTML5 Autoplay, Flashcontrol and uBlock for some elements
the others miss). They still miss some bad stuff and block some good. I just
wish they'd make it easy to block all video apart from things where you
actually click the play button.

------
mizzao
Chrome's "own ad blocker" mentioned in the article sounds good in theory, but
seems like a slippery slope to eventually making it simply show only Google's
own ads.

~~~
franga2000
Exactly! This isn't something that could happen, this is something that
absolutely WILL happen. And when it does, Google will have won yet another
battle against the decentralized web.

------
just2n
I think this is a good thing but I'm curious why the same reasoning isn't used
towards preventing ads and trackers. They're both unwanted unless the user
expresses an interest and as a bonus they also degrade performance or consume
power and data on mobile devices.

I want something like uBlock running in Chrome on Android. I can do it in
CopperheadOS or with Firefox, but it blows my mind that Google recognizes
these types of issues but won't deal with perhaps the most egregious one.

------
fapjacks
All the stipulations here basically just mean it's a decision with no legs. If
you don't want autoplaying audio, just install one of the many browser
extensions that prevent this, e.g. "Disable HTML5 Autoplay". Alternatively,
uBlock Origin and uBlock Origin Extra go a _very_ long way to cleaning up my
experience just by blocking any ads. It really only seems Bloomberg has gone
out of their way to worsen the experience for UBO users, but that's not news
you can't get somewhere else. The IBTimes is another with autoplay audio/video
which is hard to completely kill, even with the extension armed. But again,
that's not news you can't get somewhere else usually.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
>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.

I wonder if a certain "Tube" site will have "indicated interest" on by
default, hmm...

~~~
izzydata
Probably. I can't imagine the point of going to a youtube page that is solely
dedicated to a video and having no intention of watching or listening to it.

I wouldn't be opposed to being required to click play though.

~~~
wolfgang42
_> I can't imagine the point of going to a youtube page that is solely
dedicated to a video and having no intention of watching or listening to it._

When you click a notification of a comment reply, it takes you to the video
page, jumps down to the comment, _and then starts playing the video._ This
means you have to scroll up, pause the video, then scroll back down to read
the comment in peace.

~~~
izzydata
Good enough reason for me to keep it muted and / or paused.

------
WoodenChair
Safari has had this for a while in the public beta of High Sierra and also has
turned off plugins by default for eons... now how about following its lead on
that cookie thing advertisers love to do to track... oh wait.

------
grumblestumble
How does this relate to media sites? eg. Netflix, HBOGo, the rest of the cable
channel web apps? If a user clicks on a thumbnail preview and is taken to a
separate page with a video, will they now need to click on it to begin
playback? Or is clicking on the thumbnail an "expression of interest" that can
somehow be tracked across pages? For Netflix, how does this impact autoplaying
the next episode of a show?

If the above UX issues can't be solved for, this is a hammer which is going to
have an adverse impact on a growing part of the web.

~~~
grumblestumble
Looks like this is taken into account by the MEI doc:
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJ...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJLg14Ogf-
ekAFNymAJoU/mobilebasic)

as well as "The user tapped or clicked somewhere on the site during the
browsing session" (from [https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/audio-
video/auto...](https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/audio-
video/autoplay)) which should make it a non-issue for SPAs focused on video
playback.

------
kstenerud
If they'd also block mouseover autoplay, my world would be complete.

------
moomin
So here's the antitrust angle: what do you want to bet it'll have a default
exception for YouTube but not other video sites?

------
james33
There are a lot of legitimate uses for autoplay that users are expecting. This
is going to degrade the user experience for these legitimate uses, such as
games. It is frustrating that some bad actors are able to cause everyone else
to take a step back.

------
willlll
This is bad news for my personal homepage, the autoplay music is an important
part of the experience.

~~~
amiga-workbench
I have to agree, nice website!

~~~
paulmd
I think an early frontrunner for the next President of the Internet nomination
has just emerged.

[http://i.imgur.com/lhz0PYt.gif](http://i.imgur.com/lhz0PYt.gif)

As the internet expands into other areas of life, we've seen the rise of
special-interest groups such as the Weeaboo League, and issues such as
Bringing Anime To Life are expected to play a critical role in shaping the
outcome of this election. Would you care to comment on this issue?
#AllWaifusMatter

------
franga2000
Would it not make more sense to do something similar to what Firefox does for
pup-ups? The first time a site wants to autoplay, ask the user for permission
and allow them to "always allow on this site".

------
shp0ngle
Does this mean that YouTube won't play automatically after clicking on a
video?

------
artursapek
Doesn't YouTube technically autoplay videos? Is this going to disable that?

~~~
danso
The design document talks about applying a heuristic to determine which sites
are expected by users to play video:

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJ...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJLg14Ogf-
ekAFNymAJoU/mobilebasic)

> _The Media Engagement Index (MEI) aims to provide a metric reflecting the
> engagement of a given user with regards to media playback on a given origin.
> The intent of this metric is to allow websites scoring high enough to be
> able to bypass the new unified autoplay policy, thus reducing the cost on
> the ecosystem._

~~~
ravenstine
Ugh, that sounds dreadful. Doesn't this prevent anyone besides YouTube and a
handful of other sites from establishing themselves as video hosting sites?
Besides that, adding another hard-to-predict layer to the web is just... bleh.
We shouldn't need heuristics to make the web a nice place to be.

Boycotts on website should start becoming a regular thing. I simply don't
return to websites that pull shenanigans like autoplaying videos on scroll. If
I must, I use archive.is so that crap gets stripped out and I don't give them
a genuine hit.

~~~
Dylan16807
It kicks in once the user visits a site 5 times. Nothing that really favors
big sites.

I have no idea what to do about the hundreds of gotchas around
html/css/javascript.

------
vit05
I think, as a consumer, that is great. But, isn't a little worrying how Google
is starting having so much power in induce how we can experience the Internet?

~~~
javajocky
You're not wrong. Because of their browser share, Google on the desktop and
Apple on mobile basically can control how people experience the internet, and
they're now choosing to exert that power. It's something to keep an eye on.
People might like what they're doing right now, but what if they don't like
something they do two steps down the road?

------
diminish
Best would be stopping huge video downloads and auto plays. Sound is
distracting but not that important as users have various levels of mute
capabilities.

------
lamontcg
kill it all, please. let me enable it for the few sites that i actually want
to watch videos on.

------
rakibtg
I started feel bad for facebook, as it auto plays its ad while scroll. Thanks
Google.

------
consto
There are two sites, and two sites only that I like autoplay on: YouTube and
Twitch.

------
j45
Nice to see such ads penalized on the search side, and prevented on the
browser side.

------
appleiigs
Does "stop autoplaying" also include not downloading the big media file?

------
joefreeman
Ironically I'm seeing several auto-playing ads (with sound) on this article.

------
graphememes
Chrome should be abandoned. This corporation controls way too much.

------
solomatov
Autoplay videos are popup windows of 2010s

------
EGreg
As usual it shouldn't be one way or the other for everyone. THIS SHOULD BE A
SETTING!

Some people like sound at home and some at work don't.

------
caiob
Safari does this on High Sierra.

------
RUG3Y
A step in the right direction.

------
lasermike026
Thank You Google!

------
taytus
2017 and this is a brand new feature. Think about it...2017.

