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0 pointstroydavis7y ago0 comments

The Chrome flag doesn't do what it sounds like it does (and what it should). Essentially everyone logically interprets it as blocking all auto playing videos, audio or not, but that isn’t one of its options.

Given the number of people who hate unauthorized autoplaying video (including silent video), it’s sort of amazing that Chrome’s product management team hasn’t added a way to prevent it - at least as a buried config flag and ideally as domain rules (like the “Clear cookies on exit” rules). That wouldn’t preclude using automated heuristics to add and remove sites from the filters, but at least there’d be a reliable way to turn it off and whitelist a few domains.

Background from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16367457#16370471:

“Alas, this flag only prevents video that has sound from auto-playing. It’s the inadequate option that my earlier comment was referring to.

Here’s more: https://www.chromium.org/audio-video/autoplay

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p...

Quoting the blog post, Google’s decision that ”Muted autoplay is always allowed” is the problem. If any other Chrome users wondered why videos now auto-play without sound (even with this option set), at least based on the relatively minimal docs about this flag, this is why.

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jamessb7y ago

> Given the number of people who hate unauthorized autoplaying video (including silent video), it’s sort of amazing that Chrome’s product management team hasn’t added a way to prevent it

I wouldn't hold much hope for them doing this - the official autoplay policy announcement blog post says [1]:

> One cool way to engage users is about using muted autoplay and let them chose to unmute (see code snippet below). Some websites already do this effectively, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

[1] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p...

apatters7y ago

> One cool way to engage users is about using muted autoplay and let them chose to unmute (see code snippet below).

This line really illustrates how poorly Google understands the role of the browser. The browser's job isn't to help developers "engage" users, which just means getting them to spend more of their time on the site. Why would any user install a browser which is optimized to consume as much of their time as possible? The browser's job is to protect me from abusive publishers, not enable more abuse.

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