Firefox currently autoplays video that has no audio. This is a delicate balance. If browsers disable autoplay by default, then advertisers will find other ways to push video ads in users' faces. I read an anecdote that Google tried disabling autoplay on mobile and advertisers started playing video ads using an H.264 video decoder in JavaScript that paints video frames to a canvas. So users still see the video ad, but now using more bandwidth, memory, and CPU.
Can we crowdsource home addresses of advertisers who do this, and mail them shit daily until they stop? "People will be absolute dicks if we make the user experience better" is not a good argument for making the user experience worse. If the fuckers keep escalating the badness, more people will use adblockers. And if adblockers are not enough, then it's time to start mailing them shit I guess, and escalating from there.
Or using a browser where it's unambiguously blockable. A lot of people I know care less than I do about that sort of thing. That should be enough eyeballs for ad revenue, leaving people like us unmolested by that antisocial advertising behaving.
Right. The developers are bad people because of this. Curses to them. Maybe they're <insert some giant ad-oriented corporation here with F or G in the name> employees moonlighting as traitors to the human condition, already suffering from forced information shoved at us, and attention issues?
