
Google has removed the option to disable autoplay from Mobile Chrome - baybal2
https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/26214034
======
spankalee
(disclaimer: I work at Google, not on Chrome)

The rationale here seems to be that by blocking video autoplay, Chrome
incentivized sites shipping huge animated GIFs, or decoding video in JS and
painting to canvas, both of which are very suboptimal for users.

Another comment points to this issue:
[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=106364...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1063649#c8)

quote:

Unfortunately, full autoplay blocking is counter productive as images and
<canvas> can do "video" playback just fine. We had this issue on mobile and
ended up enabling muted autoplay there to avoid that issues.We found many
websites having 100MB gifs that could be one order of magnitude smaller when
implemented as <video autoplay muted>.

endquote

This seems like a case of "the more you squeeze, the more sand trickles
through your fingers?". Sites already have a way of always autoplaying muted
video, but it involves either shipping 10x the bytes, or spending huge amounts
of CPU and battery on decoding in JS.

Might as well let them autoplay muted video and save the user's
network/CPU/battery.

~~~
userbinator
Then maybe the solution is to also have the option turn off animated GIFs and
perhaps frequent canvas repaints too; and not simply _give up completely_!

In any case, just leaving the option alone so at least it has _some_ effect
like it did before, would still be better than essentially a full surrender.

~~~
fiblye
This is the common sense solution.

And what sites are replacing videos with massive gifs? Buzzfeed-like sites
have always been filling their pages with 250 megabytes of gifs. News sites
with half a dozen autoplaying videos certainly won't be replacing their videos
with multi-gigabyte gif versions. And it seems like detecting a large,
constantly repainted canvas would be easy enough.

~~~
ajmurmann
I dream of a search engine that heavily penalizes websites with advertisements
on it.

~~~
cdmckay
Seems unlikely given the biggest search engine makes the majority of its money
from ads :(

~~~
toper-centage
Search engines dont earn money from ads on other sites though. The problem is
that all alternative engines are based on google and bing, and that wont
change soon, so there's no flexibility.

~~~
XMPPwocky
Google earns money from ads on all sorts of websites.

------
dmitryminkovsky
A lot of comments here trying to explain this away but let me point out that
Apple disabled autoplaying unmuted videos in moble Safari years ago (it's not
even behind a setting as far as I know) and I can't imagine them backing off
of that any time soon.

On the contrary, Apple will savage decades old APIs just to marginally improve
privacy [0]. Which is what Google would do if users were the customer.

Apple is problematic in many ways, but I'm glad there's at least one mega-
corporation that's really staked out privacy and user experience as a selling
point for paying customers.

[0] [https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie-
blocki...](https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie-blocking-and-
more/)

~~~
ehsankia
> autoplaying unmuted videos

autoplaying unmuted videos have been disabled on almost every browser, on
desktop and on mobile, for years. This isn't unique to Safari and Apple.

This is specifically about autoplaying _muted_ videos, which gifs and canvas
can replace.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
So block autoplaying animated gifs and canvas animations?

~~~
untog
In the canvas case it wouldn’t block the huge downloads, it would just stop
them being visible.

~~~
kikokikokiko
Just by not being visible it would already be a better experience for the
user.

~~~
esperent
You might be surprised how few users agree with you on this point - or rather,
care enough to engage in the conversation at all. Blocking non-muted video is
something most people are happy about. Blocking mute animations, I don't think
many people are gonna waste much energy caring about it.

------
yalogin
This is weird. They see the general tech community slowly turning against them
and they double down on all the wrong things they were doing that caused the
negativity.

~~~
untog
The general tech community is a tiny fraction of their user base, though. Put
simply, they don’t care.

~~~
airstrike
I subscribe to the idea that the tech community overlaps with the definition
of "early adopters", who become zealots driving everyone else's adoption

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle)

~~~
smoe
I agree. But I think the early adoptors mattered back in 2008.I reckon, with
the dominance they now have, they are fine with some developers moving to
firefox while still having time to react if they pull too many "normal" users
with them. Especially since Mozilla isnt exactly peak popularity in terms of
vision either.

~~~
airstrike
IE was also absurdly dominant back then. I appreciate the fact that we now
live in a world where everything is integrated, so the costs of switching are
higher, but it's not impossible

~~~
smoe
Sure but IE back then was also severely lacking in pretty much every regard
and stopped any tangible development. At least every developer I know back
then switched away from it primarly because of developer tooling available in
other browsers secondarly because of lack of other features.

With todays major browsers landscape the differences are much more subtle.
From a developer productivity perspectice I don't think it matters that much
anymore, none is really a 10x or even a 3x browser over the others.

So I don't see a huge developer exodus happing for Chrome as long as they
don't completely cripple their web dev experience.

------
chromeengineer3
I was curious about the rationale for this, so I did a quick search on
chrome's issue tracker [1].

According to
[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=106364...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1063649#c8),
it was removed because it didn't actually stop sites from autoplaying video:

> full autoplay blocking is counter productive as images and <canvas> can do
> "video" playback just fine. We had this issue on mobile and ended up
> enabling muted autoplay there to avoid that issues.We found many websites
> having 100MB gifs that could be one order of magnitude smaller when
> implemented as <video autoplay muted>.

(Disclaimer: I work on Chrome at Google, but not on media.)

[1]:
[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list?q=media%20s...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list?q=media%20site%20settings&can=1)

~~~
userbinator
I notice your comment just a second after I posted this comment that suggests
a reason:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24403934](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24403934)

...and it turns out I was right! "It doesn't work all the time, let's remove
it." Frankly, I really _really_ hate that attitude.

~~~
duskwuff
Well... not so much "it doesn't work all the time", but "publishers are
reacting to the existence of this option by using grossly inefficient
alternatives which we can't block".

~~~
userbinator
Then let them...!

At least the option would have some effect, now it has none. That is clearly a
worse situation than before.

Fuck this idiotic slow boiling of the users.

------
kelnos
I don't get why Firefox's market share is still so low when compared to
Chrome's. I get why FF fell behind over the last decade, but since Firefox
Quantum those reasons have largely disappeared.

~~~
Termious
Techies don't like to think about it, but it's obvious. The _only_ reason why
Chrome has come to dominate the market is because Google leveraged their
monopoly in search. And even beyond Google Search, if you used Google Mail or
anything else by Google, they'd repeatedly put notifications telling you that
Chrome is great and why don't you download it? Then there's using all those
billions of dollars to pay everybody to help advertise Chrome by adding it to
their installers as an opt-out. It's no wonder Chrome is everywhere, Google
did their best to abuse their position to ensure that it was a foregone
conclusion.

I wonder more about why people accept their anti-competitive behavior when
Microsoft was shafted for doing pretty much the same thing.

~~~
freyr
Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows and made it impossible for
users to remove it. That's not at all "pretty much the same thing."

~~~
Termious
Okay, do you care to address the core point of my comment? These are two
examples of anti-competitive behavior. The details might differ, but the core
idea of what they did and how they did it is the same (abusing their dominant
position to anti-competitively disadvantage competitors). Yet Google gets a
pass because "capitalism".

~~~
freyr
I've used Google search daily for many, many years now without ever feeling
the need to use Chrome. I use Safari on my laptop and mobile Safari on my
phone. I can't recall the last time I saw anything pushing me towards Chrome.

I'll take your word for it that these happens or happened, but I just tried a
search in Safari and saw no Chrome ads.

------
znpy
Google continues the war against its own users.

~~~
sg47
Indeed. A list of Google's decisions that drive me crazy.

1\. Killing Google Reader 2\. Removing swipe from Google News feed (both
Chrome homepage and News feed in Android that's part of the launcher) 3\.
Deprecating Google Play Music and switching to Youtube Music (the interface is
horrible and intended for videos). I'm a paying user of Google Play Music and
this is idiotic. 4\. Random recommendations in Youtube, especially more of the
same. I have to open one-off videos in a private window so that I don't get
recommendations 5\. Minor changes in G Suite that make no sense (I'm
forgetting what these are at the moment) 6\. Showing ads for everything even
when I'm just looking for medical information 7\. GBoard suddenly asking me to
add misspelled words to the dictionary 8\. Google Maps interface changes (all
the freaking time)

I really wish Google would send all its PMs on a sabbatical for a while so
that I can go about using these products in peace without random changes.

~~~
yoz-y
Disclaimer: I work for Google

1\. I was annoyed at killing reader too. However, in hindsight before we had
Google reader and that was it. Now there is Feedly, Feedbin and multiple self
hosted aggregators. And a plethora of RSS clients. RSS did not “die” because
of lack of tech around it but because majority prefers twitter and Facebook.
Had Reader stayed, would people be lamenting its dominant position?

~~~
doublerabbit
As your a google employee, whats the reason of google suddenly implementing
YouTube "Sign in to continue" popups when I try to use YouTube?

I have cookies disabled however, with that, it means I then get the popup
every single time I play the video.

------
Fede_V
Why not allow users to specify that they do not want any site with autoplay
videos (in any shape) to show up in their top results? Alternatively - when
Google shows a search result, indicate if the website has autoplay videos,
this way I can avoid clicking it.

------
debuggingnoob
This thread is a microcosm of the problems with the world at large atm. 70% of
the response are people frothing at the mouth outrages over those evil "other
people" when the other people had nothing but good intentions. Then absolutely
refusing to see those good intentions and painting everything as poorly as
possible.

~~~
beervirus
I’m not sure Google is entitled to any charitable opinions at this point.

~~~
Spivak
Why? The engineers in the bug tracker seem to be making this change
specifically to improve user experience. Trying to plug the hole by blocking
gifs, canvas, and whatever people would think of next seems worse than just
letting them do the right thing.

Google is a huge company with very little of what could be considered a
unified vision. It doesn’t make that much sense to talk about Google as a
single unit but as many teams with vague corporate influences.

I think it’s reasonable to be a little conservative when any decision you make
has to work for billions of installs and every unknown website.

------
bfuclusion
I can't have Ublock origin, so mobile chrome is already a shit show.

~~~
lettergram
Firefox on android did have the option to have ublock as an extension
(luckily)

~~~
bfuclusion
Yeah, which is why I stick with it even though they just butchered a few areas
of the UI (most notably the home screen). Fortunately they seem to be
listening to reviews and fixing things.

~~~
pteraspidomorph
Does anyone know if there is a way in the new Firefox for Android to stop it
from keeping my tabs open when I close the window without using "Quit"?

~~~
snoshy
Yes, there's an option in Settings to close open tabs on quit.

~~~
pteraspidomorph
Thank you for trying to help, but I think you missed a part of the question.

~~~
snoshy
Ah, you're right. No, there isn't an option to do this without explicitly
Quitting. I find it a glaring omission myself, along with the fact that
deleting Browsing History and Site Data are combined into a single option.

------
donohoe
Clearly Google was listening to the hoards of users who were incessant in
asking that auto-play be mandatory without exception.

(I know, sarcasm is lowest form of humor)

~~~
josefx
Googles users are companies that buy ads, so no need for sarcasm.

------
bambax
> _How to fix before I abandon Chrome entirely?_

Why wait? Firefox on Android works fine and accepts extensions, including,
yes, uBlock Origin. Your experience will be a million times better.

------
egberts1
Need to drag in the entire clusterf*ck of CDNs hosting ads that accompanies
with each YouTube video because ... revenue.

------
thayne
The cynic in me wonders about the timing of this happening shortly after
backlash against the new Firefox mobile, and Mozilla lay-offs.

~~~
pvg
This change has been part of Chrome for many months. Look at the date on the
report, for one.

------
causality0
The Chrome Team really needs to be broken away from Google.

~~~
pb7
Who is going to pay them?

~~~
dredmorbius
"Nobody" would be a better situation than we have now.

(Microsoft and Brave both depend on Chrome, however.)

~~~
sabana
*Chromium

~~~
josefx
Identical code, different name. I think chromium will even side load the
closed source DRM module the first chance it gets.

------
vertis
As much as I find Firefox less than user friendly at times (by comparison), it
is worlds better when it comes to blocking unwanted items and putting the user
first (For example Multi-account containers).

I really wish that Chrome wasn't so dominant. Google has all it's incentives
in the wrong place, and therefore can't be trusted to fight for the user.

------
untog
There’s a [dead] post here from a Chrome engineer that links to the relevant
Chrome issue:

[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=106364...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1063649#c8)

> full autoplay blocking is counter productive as images and <canvas> can do
> "video" playback just fine. We had this issue on mobile and ended up
> enabling muted autoplay there to avoid that issues.We found many websites
> having 100MB gifs that could be one order of magnitude smaller when
> implemented as <video autoplay muted>.

The logic _kind_ of makes sense. Autoplay videos already have to be muted so
there’s no issue with sound. And if you disable video then idiot ad providers
will resort to alternatives that chew up considerably more bandwidth and/or
CPU.

I guess they need a setting to disable all canvas tags and GIFs _and_ all
autoplay videos.

~~~
Gibbon1
Doesn't slack look at the size of a gif and skip playing it if it's bigger
than 4mb or something?

I'm reminded of Steve Jobs comment on 'toner heads' and why Xerox failed.
Google is now run by MBA's and Ad people. So they will continue to do things
like this.

~~~
untog
It does, but the Slack servers still need to download the image first to know
it’s size. There’s no equivalent for a browser. You could rely on Content-
Length headers but then ad servers are just going to stop sending them.

~~~
marcinzm
You can download the first frame and then only download 4mb of the rest. If
that's not the whole thing then don't download the rest. Or download up to 4mb
and if there's more then ignore it and just pull the first frame from the 4mb.
Or if the content-length isn't set then assume it's over 4mb and only download
the first frame. Granted there's extra complexity in parsing the first frame
from a gif in real time.

------
lvs
The solution I've found is just to disable javascript altogether, then
manually whitelist a small number of sites that don't work without js. Sure, a
lot of the web stops working for me, but it's also probably the part of the
web I don't want to see anymore anyway.

~~~
aembleton
Just disabling 3rd party JS solves a lot of the problems. Still have to
whitelist a lot, but it is easier than blocking which just feels like whack-a-
mole.

------
jdc
If you're looking to switch and Firefox isn't your cup of tea, you'd probably
like Kiwi -- it's based on Chromium and it has an integrated ad-blocker.

[https://kiwibrowser.com](https://kiwibrowser.com)

~~~
SXX
Why it's not mentioned anywhere on website that it's open source?

[https://github.com/kiwibrowser/src](https://github.com/kiwibrowser/src)

PS: Oops, another guy posted the link earler.

------
gruez
tangentially related: what's everyone's solution for blocking autoplaying
sticky videos? By that I mean the kind that usually shows up on news sites or
tech blogs. It usually manifests as a "recommended" video that's totally
unrelated to the article at hand, and stars playing without you clicking the
play button. If you scroll past the video, many of them convert to a sticky
mini player that stays around wherever you scroll.

I've tried changing the autoplay setting from "block audio" to "block audio
and video", but that breaks sites, especially the ones that assume you have
autoplay enabled and don't have controls available. It's also hard to know
when something's broken. I see a static image and I'm left to wonder whether
it's a video that's hasn't started yet or it's actually a picture. For some
sites, blocking autoplay don't even prevent the videos from loading because
they start video playback during an onScroll event, which makes the browser
think the playback was user-initiated.

~~~
kikokikokiko
Use UBlockOrigin, and every time you see one of those sticky thumb players,
create a regex rule to remove it. I must have hundreds of those little rules
in place on my browsers. I never searched how to send my list to one of the
maintainers of the most popular ad/annoyance lists but I think now it's time.

~~~
aembleton
I was doing that but it became frustrating, so I blocked all 3rd party JS and
then whitelisted as I went around the web.

My filter list is here: [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aembleton/Arthurs-
Annoyanc...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aembleton/Arthurs-
Annoyances/master/filter.txt)

------
tus88
Not really. Just disable JS and you are good as gold. Even though JS is not
technically required, find a website that doesn't load almost all media assets
using JS. And when you occasionally need to use JS, just share the webpage
with another browser like Edge that has JS enabled. Guru level mobile
browsing.

------
paulie_a
YouTube Android now seems to autoplay but not when you are casting.

I haven't looked into it, who knows I might have flipped the switch.

But previously they would or would not autoplay on both as far as I can recall

------
iamdual
The real scandal is that people still using Google's Chrome.

------
Gallactide
Soooo google wants Autoplay ads on their sites too now!

They're not about to make their own product limit their own whims!

------
coronadisaster
e option to disable autoplay on YOUTUbE was already somewhat hidden so that is
not a big surprise....

------
mobilemidget
I just noticed the first, Netflix like, 'are you still watching' challenge on
YouTube, never had that before.

~~~
weknowbetter
This happens to me a lot, but my use case is "watching" full music albums all
day. Usually halfway through every other album it will pause and ask I'm
"still watching".

I usually just use the media controls on my keyboard to un-pause it without
actually clicking the modal.

------
GPUboy
This could also just be a mistake. There's often regressions or bugs in mobile
chrome.

~~~
creato
I mean, the issue literally is that the option exists, it just doesn't work.
It doesn't sound intentional.

But then again, it was reported 9 months ago. It should have been fixed by
now.

~~~
userbinator
_the option exists, it just doesn 't work_

It might not be true in this instance, but I've seen so many times where "the
option doesn't fully work and hasn't been working for a while, so let's just
remove it entirely" has happened to features in other products.

------
frouge
Don't be evil guys

------
lumberingjack
abandon Chrome? oh nooooo!

------
RedComet
I consider browser video autoplay more offensive than physical assault tbh.

~~~
judge2020
Browser autoplay doesn't have the real-world consequence of needing medical
attention and going thousands of dollars into debt.

~~~
ulucs
> going thousands of dollars into debt

That is the case for only a single country in the whole world

------
bad_user
I don’t understand what’s the problem with auto-playing muted video.

Facebook and Twitter have been doing it in their apps. The mobile apps are
more popular than the web pages. The exodus to native apps has already been
happening. The web has evolved from the days of static text content, like it
or hate it, if you stop the progress, the web will die.

And really, some suggestions don’t make sense. Stopping the auto-playing of
GIFs? That’s the whole point of GIFs, and you’re 15 years too late.

