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.
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...