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Comment by rainbowmverse | Hacker News Reader

I don't want any auto-playing videos, sound or not. They always seem to pop up next to the text I came there to read. I can't focus with that.

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Same here. However for me it's not only an annoyance, but since I'm on a metered connection (LTE with severe throttling after 50 GB only avoidable by buying extra volume), this is costing me real money. Opening a Bloomberg article in the background will happily autplay a series of videos I may not notice. And that's with uBlock Origin installed.

I just opened such an article and in the 5 minute window since I did so, the page consumed a cool 100 MB for a 2:20 video. It obviously gets worse with longer videos.

Then use Firefox :)

+1 It's trivially easy to stop ALL media from autoplaying - including gifs! It's wonderful (but sometimes jarring when I expect a gif to be playing already)

Firefox also lets you mute a tab without switching to the tab.

Chrome does too. Just right click on it and "Mute site" will mute the domain. Forever I think.

I tried it again recently. The mobile app is just too slow to start, and I'm currently stuck with a phone with too little memory to not autokill stuff. I realize Chrome's apparent snappiness is probably due to some questionable and likely anti-competitive integrations by Google, like Microsoft in the 2000s.

Also a consideration if hording tabs.

I am mildly annoyed by the memory usage taking almost 8 gb of ram for a mere 70 tabs [1].

I thought chrome had superior history search indexing full text once. Was that feature culled?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16560655

There's already a flag for that: chrome://flags Autoplay policy.

I can't think of one reason why it shouldn't be the default behavior.

However, it does not seem to work in most cases that I've found. I was super excited when it arrived, but I'm still hunting down the domains of auto-play videos and adding them to a blacklist manually.

The choices seem to be "document user gesture", "user gesture is required", "no user gesture is required", and "default". There needs to be a "never autoplay any media"

I thought I was doing something wrong when I set the flag. Thank you for confirming it really doesn't work.

Guess I should have just preached "use Firefox" like I usually do. That's what I get for trying to see things from the other side for once.

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