

In that post, Lamouri and two other Google developers, Tom Greenaway and Hongchan Choi, explained that browsers haven't done a good job helping users manage sound. The Chocolate Factory delayed its changes in November, 2018, after objections from those developing web audio applications. The ad biz's post continues by explaining the rather complicated Media Engagement Index (MEI) threshold used in desktop Chrome to determine when audio will automatically play. In 2017, Google announced changes in its autoplay policy, describing the revised rules, affecting both audio and video, as simple. These techniques are much worse than optimized video in terms of power consumption, performance, bandwidth requirements, data cost and memory usage." "Disabling autoplay had the unintended effect of driving developers to alternatives such as animated GIFs, as well as and hacks. "Autoplay was disabled in previous versions of Chrome on Android because it can be disruptive, data-hungry and many users don't like it," Google developer advocate Sam Dutton explained at the time. Several of those discussing the issue pointed to other browsers like Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox that provide more extensive media playback options.īut in the context of autoplay, Google has tried to serve both users and publishers since at least 2016, when Chrome 53 debuted and brought with it a change: Instead of disabling video autoplay, the update would allow it to play, but without sound. When this issue surfaced in a Hacker News discussion over the weekend, it prompted objections from forum participants that Chrome fails to give users control of their browser. But it's likely to be removed at some point, he said. gif animations that play using the browser Canvas API, a choice that would consume even more bandwidth than automatically played videos.Īccording to Lamouri, there's still a command line flag to disable autoplay fully â both for audio and video: "-autoplay-policy=user-gesture-required". In other words, faced with a user's decision to prevent videos from playing automatically, web publishers would deploy bulky.

We found many websites having 100MB gifs that could be one order of magnitude smaller when implemented as. "We had this issue on mobile and ended up enabling muted autoplay there to avoid that issue. "Unfortunately, full autoplay blocking is counter productive as images and can do 'video' playback just fine," Lamouri wrote. Ask, Allow or Block is like Vivaldi browser's version of Snog Marry Avoid for popups in 2.9 READ MORE
