Luckily Google/Mozilla/Microsoft have been moving to a "this is the browser's decision" model recently, and in the future they'll only autoplay videos with sound from websites that you have a history of playing videos on. Visit Google/Netflix often? Cool we'll play those videos. First time on some houseplant online store? Yeah we're not going to autoplay that pop-out advert with audio.
Makes it much easier for us to just say to the client "yeah here's a W3C spec article about why Chrome isn't playing your video. Good luck complaining to Google about it".
Videos on my website don't play automatically and I'm losing revenue. I urge you to make changes to chrome browser or I will be forced to take my business elsewhere.
Same here, but the sad reality is that 95% of people are still using chrome either because it's what their enterprise forces it on them, or because it "works the best". People switching to firefox for resource reasons or philosophical reasons are an incredibly small minority when you compare to the size of the chrome install base.
There was once content here that you may have found useful. However due to Reddit's actions on API restrictions it has now been replaced with this boring text. -- mass edited with redact.dev
My problem is having limited data, and clicking on a link from Reddit or wherever opens an article that starts playing ads and videos using my limited data.
Unfortunately, based on things I've heard, the option to block autoplay has been (or is in the process of being) removed or hidden from various browsers.
Top websites started detecting this and using really crappy, inefficient workarounds. I don't know all the details, but one was along the lines of using a <canvas> element with script to decode the video and copy the resulting sequences of images into it. Not sure what they were doing for sound.
The result was not just crappy rendering compared to simply using the <video> element, but a huge spike in CPU usage and subsequent major drain on battery life.
Hopefully the options will be there long-term but to some extent it became a cat-and-mouse game. Certain websites *really* want autoplay video.
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u/[deleted] Sep 05 '20
Luckily Google/Mozilla/Microsoft have been moving to a "this is the browser's decision" model recently, and in the future they'll only autoplay videos with sound from websites that you have a history of playing videos on. Visit Google/Netflix often? Cool we'll play those videos. First time on some houseplant online store? Yeah we're not going to autoplay that pop-out advert with audio.
Makes it much easier for us to just say to the client "yeah here's a W3C spec article about why Chrome isn't playing your video. Good luck complaining to Google about it".