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Comment by chromeengineer3 | Hacker News Reader

I was curious about the rationale for this, so I did a quick search on chrome's issue tracker [1].

According to https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=106364..., it was removed because it didn't actually stop sites from autoplaying video:

> full autoplay blocking is counter productive as images and <canvas> can do "video" playback just fine. We had this issue on mobile and ended up enabling muted autoplay there to avoid that issues.We found many websites having 100MB gifs that could be one order of magnitude smaller when implemented as <video autoplay muted>.

(Disclaimer: I work on Chrome at Google, but not on media.)

[1]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list?q=media%20s...

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That's an argument for disabling large GIF autoplay or tying it to the autoplay setting, not for removing the autoplay setting entirely!

Though I guess in the extreme case a webpage could have a huge grid of 1x1px divs that change color in a requestAnimationFrame callback based on data retrieved over XHR.

So I can kinda see their point of view. It still seems a bit too far in the other direction if you ask me though.

... But enough grumbling. I wanted to point out the following documents for more context:

https://blog.chromium.org/2017/09/unified-autoplay.html (Somewhat wordsmithed...)

https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/audio-video/auto...

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EH7qZatVnTXsBGvQc_53R97Z...

I notice your comment just a second after I posted this comment that suggests a reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24403934

...and it turns out I was right! "It doesn't work all the time, let's remove it." Frankly, I really really hate that attitude.

Well... not so much "it doesn't work all the time", but "publishers are reacting to the existence of this option by using grossly inefficient alternatives which we can't block".

Then let them...!

At least the option would have some effect, now it has none. That is clearly a worse situation than before.

Fuck this idiotic slow boiling of the users.

Except the alternatives can be blocked.

How so? It's not only that it doesn't work, but that it is actively making the web worse.

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