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Comment by kuiooullkre | Hacker News Reader

Because browsers are now disabling autoplay even for silent videos, GIFs are going to be with us for at least another 10 years.

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There's no rational reason why a browser should autoplay a GIF and not a silent video.

There are a lot of people asking to disable autoplay even on silent videos. The main reason is they want to save bandwidth.

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=514102

Firefox Nightly supports this and I use it. It's not perfect but overall I'd say it's better than letting videos autoplay.

True. I don't care about the file format so much as whether or not it has sound and how big it is.

Which browsers and inbuilt support to disable autoplay video?

Chrome, Firefox. Safari, Edge. Ol' IE doesn't though.

How do you do it in Chrome?

"Disabling autoplay" for silent videos is impossible whenever Javascript is enabled, and it usually is.

What's the difference (to the user) between an animated <canvas> and a silent video ?

Its possible to shim Video decoding API and block/ignore until user input. https://github.com/Eloston/disable-html5-autoplay/blob/maste...

I think you missed the point of my comment : as long as JavaScript is enabled, the website can bypass the "Video decoding API" and just show the media in a <canvas> tag.

Of course, we might be able to find a middle ground between disabling JS entirely and auto-playing all media, but it may be very hard, and that "middle ground" might be changing as website developers find new way to deliver auto-playing media that bypasses the browser's restrictions.

You can disable gif autoplay

There was a relatively well-known binary edit of the Netscape browser which would disable the looping of GIFs.

Animations would animate, but only play through once.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040116134137/linuxmafia.com/fa...

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