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.
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.
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.
It could be a permission (like sharing location) or maybe a permission that can only be requested after the user clicks play on a few videos. (That would prevent me having to select "no" to every trash website that requests permissions, like Chrome allowed with pushed content permissions in the past.
Not really a solution. It works for repeat visits to sites users visit often, it doesn't really work at scale. Users want sane defaults; most of them will never change them. A world where sites are by default as malicious as users allow them to be is not a world where the internet is a friendly and powerful resource for everyone.
And this is why we can't have nice things. FWIW I agree with the decision to stop autoplaying, but it's worth pointing out that it does have negative consequences:
- Stops YouTube (et al) videos autoplaying (whitelist to fix?)
- Probably stops games playing music when first opened (e.g., https://arcade.ly/games/asteroids/, although note I have settings to disable music and SFX)
God forbid we get to a point where automatic execution of JavaScript is disabled by default but I can see it going that way.
Like I say, I agree with the decision, but sadly all these fixes for reigning in the excesses of the worst scumbag websites make the web overall just a little bit worse for everybody. :/
We've had plugins to stop automatic execution of JS for a while. I used one for about 6 months, then one day I got a new computer and didn't bother to install it... it's only when I find pages like the one I described above that I think (for like two seconds) "oh, NoScript would've stopped that." So it's only a few bad players ruining it for most of us, as you say.
They do it because video preroll CPM is waayyy higher than display advertising. Like up to $15/cpm.. Multiples of that if you can get the right deals in place (not remnant).
I find the extension rather unreliable actually. There are a lot of sites (e.g. Twitter embeds) where turning off autoplay also seems to break manually clicking play as well (forcing me to temporarily disabled the extension and reload page).
> There are a lot of sites (e.g. Twitter embeds) where turning off autoplay also seems to break manually clicking play as well
Pretty sure this is by design, as Twitter wants that content to auto-play. Forcing a poor experience for people who use blockers and making us white-list their domain seems a suitable strategy.
It's something like Facebook chat in mobile mode. Facebook wants its cattle to install that spyware-ridden messenger, so first they disable chat/messenger in the mobile site (not sure they already killed it, last time I checked there was only a warning; need to create a new bunch of test accounts to check again). As people will fight the change by using desktop-mode in mobile (one of the best features of Firefox for Android), they have a incentive to make the desktop site intentionally unusable in touch devices.
It has indeed been entirely disabled in the mobile site, and is nearly unusable if you request the desktop site (which of course can only be done through the browser settings, they don't provide a link for it). So I stopped using it!
For Twitter, you can disable video autoplay in the account settings and whitelist twitter.com in the extension. But there are other sites where this doesn't work.
The problem is that HTML 5 video is really useful for replacing animated image formats. The technology in modern video codecs is way superior than gifs, etc., and the real impact of that is greatly reduced space/bandwidth consumption, like orders of magnitude better.
Just as we start to leave gif in the dust, Facebook pulls the dick move of auto-enabling sound on all auto-played HTML 5 content.
I think that Google's solution of refusing to autoplay videos with soundtracks is a good compromise which will allow us to continue to enjoy the benefits of modern video codecs while simultaneously preventing built-in video support from gaining the bad rap that got attached to Flash.
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EDIT: Reply to rhizome, since I'm not allowed to post for a while for having an illegal opinion on Kubernetes.
I'm not suggesting that the technology would be eliminated in its entirety, but disabling autoplay of all HTML 5 video neuters its use as a replacement for animated gifs.
Problem with disabling autoplay completely is that it sort of breaks gifv and embedded content inside reddit and twitter. You sometimes need to press Play or space bar to get them going.
Thankfully in latest Safari you can check "Audio needs user action" which seems to solve the problem, although now some videos manage to start autoplay without my action.
Don't get me wrong, i wish i wouldn't have to install one single extension and that this would be a built-in feature or that the website having a video to show me won't auto-play the damn thing from the get go, but this is the world we live in.
I do remove animated GIFs that distract my focus when reading text.
I haven't yet felt the need to block CSS animations. Up to now, UX animations aren't so distracting they impede my reading. I think this may be because CSS is generally not used in ways that constantly distract while reading text.
A CSS fade or transition on scroll doesn't bother me as much as animated video/GIFs.
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...
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.
That's fair. I just feel like the cat is out of the bag on gifs. If all browsers rolled out something that blocked autoplay on every mp4 or webm regardless of audio being enabled or present, I imagine a good amount of users would feel like things had "broken even if they'd appreciate that videos on news articles don't autoplay at all (although they'd still be able to follow you around the page).
.gifs wouldn't make a site feel broken. We can't go back to actual .gifs (distinct from the layman's "gif") because they're an inappropriate format for the kind of gifs that people make today.
I think people might feel like the browser has "regressed" or "broken" if they have to press "play" on silent, looping videos that they used to expect to autoplay. Maybe broken isn't the right word. I'm just saying that I think many people expect silent .mp4s to work the way that .gifs work: autoplaying.
I really want no auto playing of any multimedia. I wish browsers didn't support this functionality at all. The user should not ever be forced to do / go through something he does not expect to happen.
I think it's ok for specific video pages on multimedia-first sites, like Youtube. (I'm not a fan of autoplay when you go to a page with multiple results, such as a creator's page.) That's about it, though.
Safari 11 has this option. It defaults to "Stop Media with Sound", but you can configure it to "Never Auto-Play" as well, and you can override this setting for individual sites.
As I recall they tried that, but the problem was that some ads would use a canvas to emulate video.
I have disabled js global in Chrome, but had to enable it for a lot of sites. That is pretty simple for me, but most people are not computer programmers; still if you have the technical chops, I recommend it.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Make notifications and autoplaying vidoes OPT-IN. A site requests the feature, and a little icon pops up on the far right of the URL bar. The user has to know to click that button to allow notifications, or auto-playing, or other exploitable features like Javascript message popups.
Now, if they want people to use those features, they simply have to write a message on their website telling them how to click that button. "Want videos to autoplay? Click here!"
But the truth is, we all know what this is really about. It's not about features, and it's not about user experience. It's all about getting more money from advertisers by telling them you've got X more "impressions" from your users even if they're not real interactions with the ads.
It's a hard one to deal with. On the one hand, all these alerts can make people think about what they really want a site to be able to do. I mean, you're probably a bit less forgiving of a site using http if its marked as insecure and messages get shown when you type into a password field.
But at the same time... they also make people blind to them. Get too many alerts, and people will just ignore them. Will people just click yes if every site asks to use autoplaying videos?
> I don't know the answer on how to deal with this stuff.
It's not a question of technology or UI. If the same thing happened in your email inbox you would know the answer. Mark as spam. The only real solution is to stop visiting sites that make your life miserable (regardless of the medium). Most of the time they don't add a lot of value anyway and they don't link to sources so why are we even trying to fix them?
> 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.
Facebook's motivation is not that users of the site want it. It's that when they autoplay it they get to lie to advertisers and claim that "users engaged with the video content for x seconds," and charge them accordingly.
Every person I see using Facebook scrolls past the vast majority of videos in their feed as fast as they can because they don't want it to start playing. And then when they do find one they want to play, it's this race to pause the video and rewind it to the beginning as they make it full screen and start it over so they can see the whole thing. Then at the end, they have to stop the auto-scrolling to the next one so they can go back and see the funny part they liked, or whatever. It's so ridiculous.
the trend seemed to be that enough people tolerated it to make advertisers and sites double down on it
I don't think that's what they're saying.
“As people watch more video on phones, they’ve come to expect sound when the volume on their device is turned on.”
Sure, when you watch a video you expect sound. That has nothing to do with autoplay, or expectations about websites in general. They're only answering the question they wished was asked, and consequently, people get played when they have the same interpretation as you did.
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.
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.
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.
> It's a shame that browsers increasingly have to actively defend against website behavior,
You make this sound like a new trend but it was always thus.
Didn't you live through the 90s before pop-up blockers were built in to browsers? Not to mentionvarious abusive plugins, attempts to trick you into installing toolbars, the hell that was RealPlayer, rewriting your history to prevent 'back', etc etc.
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.
Yeah, I guess you're right. Seems like back in the day it wasn't nearly as pervasive, you'd know to expect a terrible MIDI track if you hit somebody's MySpace page but generally didn't need to worry about it elsewhere -- but maybe that's rose-colored nostalgia speaking.
(I've never used the phrases "rose-colored nostalgia" and "MySpace" in such close proximity before)
MySpace can a bit later than what msla is referring to.. in fact, the MySpace period (mid 2000s) may have been the best in this regard, as the amateur site makers were increasingly people who didn't know HTML and used more restricted tools like Blogger, but the bandwidth for pervasive video wasn't around yet.
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!
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.
It's allowed by default, but I imagine you can change that in settings as with all other permissions. That way you could have a whitelist of sites that are allowed to play audio.
It appears that there is already a feature in Chrome for Android which allows this. It will be removed around the same time as this patch to make things more 'consistent'
>Removing the block autoplay setting that is currently available on Chrome for Android
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.
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
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.
I always assumed having video auto-play allows for ads to run in between videos playing. Maybe some sites see that and (woefully) assume it is a good way to increase audience engagement. Either way, I totally agree it is a horrible experience for the audience.
That scrolly-video you refer to, I wonder if it was an evolutionary response to ad blockers basically shutting down pup-up ad video. So the justification would probably be "the bottom line"
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.
> 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'".
> It gives you the chance to read the article while having the vision there too.
That is not a thing that an actual human is capable of doing. A human has two eyes which must be fixed in the same general direction, and one brain. As convenient as it would be for some interface designers, humans are not octopuses. The cocktail party effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect) is a useful thing to keep in mind when considering the limits of peoples' awareness. It happens for a reason.
You may think you can read an article and watch a video at the same time, but the fact is, no, you cannot. One of the two things is making it very hard to focus on the other.
That would have been a reasonable response to Apple's announcement. From what I can tell they will disable all autoplaying media in the upcoming version of Safari, including muted video.
The only thing Google won't let you do anymore is autoplay audio. I think most people agree that that's one of the things you should never ever do anyway. If you need audio, add a play button to your game/creative coding thing.
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).
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.
I mean, "worse" here is really a relative term when it's so easy to re-enable for a page. I can't say i'm empathetic when i mostly see stupid autoplayed news clips and car ads.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
I guess it'll be handled the same way "intrusive advertising" is going to be handled. That is, Google is always going to be acceptable and it's only non-Google services that will be blocked.
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".
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?
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?
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.
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...