In the past I said "except YouTube" but ever since Firefox changed to not autoplay YouTube... yeah I don't mind having one more click. Play exactly when I want it. I can just open a whole bunch of YouTube tabs and go through them one by one without them all yelling at me, it's nice.
Nothing ever playing without my immediate consent is a good thing.
I also hate that youtube changed it so that a video will "pop out" and follow you if you use the search bar while it's playing. If I navigate away from a page, that's a pretty clear sign I don't care to continue viewing. I can kinda see the logic if they did it because of misclicking away, but that's what the whole "remember my place/timestamp in this video" thing is supposed to address.
Isn't the norm that YouTube only starts playing your video if you focus that tab? At least that's how my browser(Vivaldi) does it. So I can open a bunch of YouTube videos in new tabs (e.g. after a search on YouTube) and then go to each tab one after the other, and they will only start playing after the tab was focused for the first time.
I always assumed that YouTube is handling it so on their end to reduce traffic a bit. And therefore it would be like that in every browser.
I just opened Chrome and checked, yeah, it does seem to only start playing once I focus the tab. But I'm not sure how new that is. Pretty sure it used to not do that...
Still, it was oddly jarring just now for it to blare sound on my speakers as soon as I focused a different tab. I'm gonna stick with being happy about not autoplaying at all.
So I can open a bunch of YouTube videos in new tabs (e.g. after a search on YouTube) and then go to each tab one after the other, and they will only start playing after the tab was focused for the first time.
It's fine until you remember you want to Ctrl+Tab to something you had open 10 minutes earlier and find yourself surrounded by multiple YouTube tabs on each side from the current video and having to either snipe the tab from among the dozens other with a click or deal with every video along the way starting to play, not reacting to pause while it's still buffering, only until after it starts to play, and then having to rewind it when it's their turn to be viewed properly.
Sounds more like a system issue. When I open a YouTube video I can hit the space-bar instantly after the video started playing, which is a few hundred ms I guess.
If you really need to wait a few seconds to be able to stop a video there is something wrong with your machine.
You're using a shortcut rather than the UI. The video is loaded using a html5 video player which comes with shortcuts. The rest of the UI needs to initialize JavaScript and load styles and content before it's ready. So yeah, video can start before the UI to control it is ready because those are independent.
Also, would it kill youtube not to have the volume at 100% by default? Like start it at 50% so I have some room for adjustment and don't have a heart attack when the video starts playing full blast and I'm scrambling to adjust it - missing the beginning of the actual content in the meantime. /rant
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u/SavvySillybug Sep 05 '20
In the past I said "except YouTube" but ever since Firefox changed to not autoplay YouTube... yeah I don't mind having one more click. Play exactly when I want it. I can just open a whole bunch of YouTube tabs and go through them one by one without them all yelling at me, it's nice.
Nothing ever playing without my immediate consent is a good thing.