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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Then maybe the solution is to also have the option turn off animated GIFs and perhaps frequent canvas repaints too; and not simply give up completely!

In any case, just leaving the option alone so at least it has some effect like it did before, would still be better than essentially a full surrender.

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This is the common sense solution.

And what sites are replacing videos with massive gifs? Buzzfeed-like sites have always been filling their pages with 250 megabytes of gifs. News sites with half a dozen autoplaying videos certainly won't be replacing their videos with multi-gigabyte gif versions. And it seems like detecting a large, constantly repainted canvas would be easy enough.

I remember implementing some web proxy monitoring a while ago, and I had a whole list of sites I had to ignore because of stuff like this. HN homepage would take a handful of milliseconds to load, but some sites would routinely take 10-20 second to get to the window load. Somebody asked “but what if a user complains that cnn.com is loading too slowly?”, and we all agreed we’d just have to tell them to get in touch with CNN.

And if you replace videos with gigabytes of gifs, customers will leave because the gifs take ages to load.

Or complain that their browser is slow/ battery life is abysmal.

I dream of a search engine that heavily penalizes websites with advertisements on it.

Seems unlikely given the biggest search engine makes the majority of its money from ads :(

Search engines dont earn money from ads on other sites though. The problem is that all alternative engines are based on google and bing, and that wont change soon, so there's no flexibility.

Google earns money from ads on all sorts of websites.

That's how autoplay videos were originally implemented on mobile browsers. Implementations included GIFs, or giant JPGs of stitched video frames switched out with JS. Some even used video decoders that were transpiled to JS and there are webassembly versions now too.

It was all replaced when browsers finally implemented video tags that played in screen, but the tech still exists.

BigG couldn't do that (disable other user hostile media) because it would interfere with ads.

Now I'm looking for a gif and canvas blocker for FF mobile. Any hints on how to tune uBO?

You can't turn off gifs or canvas because it would just break too much internet.

I could imagine and equal reaction thread here if google deemed some gifs and canvas uses "unworthy" and were blockable.

This is not an excuse - the user should have the freedom to disable whatever they want - who is to say that your definition of a broken internet matches mine?

This.

If I, the user, disable some functionality and the site doesn't work I can:

A: add the site to an allow list B: temporarily enable the feature for that site C: stop using the site

Most of the time I'll give a site the benefit of the doubt, only when they pull shady tricks like dark patterns and whatnot do I just stop using the site.

Reddit is a great current example. I will not use their site or their app because they're both awful, and reddit is trying to force the app down my throat. If the app I use gets shut down by API changes I'll just stop using reddit.

Not sure how it would break the internet at all, can you say that you have ever had a user experience improved by auto playing anything?

I mean, heaven for bid, they could the user the ability to actually control the repaint rate. Or pull only the first frame of a gif, and not pull the 100+ meg gif without user consent(via touch, by site, etc..) Browsers wouldn't block popups for years because it could break legitimate use, now I don't think a single browser doesn't ship with that option not on by default.

I think the reality is, that these are features and functions that advertisers want, and google is in the business of selling ads.

This isn't a can't, its a won't.

Agree -- I mean even Buzzfeed of all sites usually doesn't auto-play their gifs[0]; you get a static image with a play button that swaps to the gif when you click it.

[0] Just realized while typing this that I haven't clicked a Buzzfeed link in a long time, so my memory might be off. But I know some site I used to visit frequently did this.

> You can't turn off gifs or canvas because it would just break too much internet.

That sounds like a challenge.

I think if there were a click to play button on gifs > N megabytes or > X*Y resolution, nobody would complain, nor would they complain about click to play on frequently updated canvases.

I suggest using uBlock Origin https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...

Why limit it based on resolution? When 'disable autoplay' is selected, i would like play button for all videos, animated GIFs or animated SVGs.

It what way would putting a play button on gifs above a certain file size break the internet?

Another organisation's guiding principles suggest an alternate viewpoint:

Individuals must have the ability to shape the internet and their own experiences on it.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

Mozilla's slogan used to say "putting users in control", which was then silently(?) replaced with "individuals":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040344

It's a very convenient phrasing, because these "individuals" certainly are doing what they say; it's just that they are not you. I trust Mozilla only slightly more than Google.

I see "individuals" as generally preferable to "users", though possibly less clear as to ... er, use role.

Turning off canvas only breaks tracking. Very few sites require it to work. Firefox will ask you to enable it on a per-site bases by enabling privacy.resistFingerprinting.

Canvas is video (or spyware). If I don't want autopay video, I don't want autoplay canvas.

It would be nice if the browser knew how big the gifs were before it downloaded them, and thus didn't download anything over a certain size.

Isn't the size in the header? (Which yea, could be faked, or sent as Chunked) the USER-agent could just make a cap, and stop after 1mb when image/gif media type

HTTP allows the body length to be specified in the header before the body is downloaded via the `Content-Length` header. It also allows you to stream the body in chunks by setting the `Transfer-Encoding` header to `chunked`, as you've mentioned, in which case each chunk starts with its own length. In both cases, the length cannot be faked because the recipient will stop pulling bytes after the specified length, as that's the purpose of sending such length (after there's no more bytes according to the latest length, the connection is free to be used for a subsequent response)!

You can just block all <canvas> tags with a `##canvas` rule for uBlock Origin. It of course breaks some real sites, but not on anything I use regularly. A canvas repaint rate limit could be nice, though I have been surprised at how little I notice all canvas tags just being blocked.

Gifs are trickier. I'll often see non-animated images in gif format. Because of extension API limitations, uBO can't block gifs based on file size or animation frame count. (file size isn't even known until the start of the fetch)

Though Firefox at least does lets you disable all gif animations without just blocking all gifs.

Gifs are trickier. I'll often see non-animated images in gif format. uBO doesn't have the power to block images based on file size. (The file size isn't even known until the start of the fetch)

Browsers' native functionality (if not deliberately crippled) and filtering proxies can definitely block animated GIFs while leaving static ones alone, by simply terminating the connection after the first frame.

IE6 or even lower had the option to show and load only the first frame.

> Then maybe the solution is to also have the option turn off animated GIFs

Safari actually does that! At least on Big Sur, if you enable the "Reduce Motion" option in Accessibility Preferences, gifs only animate when you hover the pointer over them.

Feels a bit odd at first (e.g. on animated Discord emojis) but then it seems like an option that should have been there since forever.

> Safari actually does that! At least on Big Sur, if you enable the "Reduce Motion" option in Accessibility Preferences, gifs only animate when you hover the pointer over them.

I'm not on Big Sur yet, so I can't check, but it's a shame if that's the only way to animate it, because I might trust OS-curated animations but not random-website-curated animations. It's a browser preference, not necessarily an OS-wide preference. (But I do think that inheriting it is sensible!)

As with all things customiseable, Firefox has had this option for a long time. (But look for their Chrome-chasing to lead them to get rid of this option soon ….)

> Then maybe the solution is to also have the option turn off animated GIFs

Here's a hammer Google has used before to make other websites tow their line: Peanlize their search rankings.

How about restricting the frame rate of all elements until some heuristic determines that the user has interacted with them?

Restricting framerate will still download the 100mb GIF.

Also, so many parts of websites use gifs and canvas. If you start blocking those, you'll be hiding loading spinners, menus and more. You're adding ton and ton of complexity and going at war after something pretty silly.

If a website is abusive and does shitty things, just don't use the website. After some point, it's no longer the browsers job to babysit the web. I completely agreed with autoplaying audio, but blocking video is just not worth it.

I'd like the option to abort downloading once a gif reaches the first full frame or 1MB. Whichever comes first. Looks like Chrome will never be that browser.

Seriously gif is only used because it's autoplay predates widespread abuse of autoplay generally. Now is the time to put an end to it, at least as an option.

> If a website is abusive and does shitty things, just don't use the website.

What do you do if the aforementioned is not done by the website as such, but by some omnipresent, and hard to avoid 3rd party ad net?

> After some point, it's no longer the browsers job to babysit the web. I completely agreed with autoplaying audio, but blocking video is just not worth it.

Video is by far the heaviest piece of media out there. There is no practical means to reduce its loading time, especially on mobile. It simply cannot be considered an ordinary piece of page content.

Lastly, people are sick and tired of video ads, and, particularly, obscene, bombastic, and blinking like no tomorrow ones.

> What do you do if the aforementioned is not done by the website as such, but by some omnipresent, and hard to avoid 3rd party ad net?

Use an ad blocker. Since mobile chrome doesn't allow adblocking, this means you will have to choose one of the many other mobile browsers that do.

This is not a duty of adblocker. You don't have it to be an ad to bust your data package.

Canvas and gifs could be an opt-in feature on a per-website basis, just like notifications and webcam access.

With that logic, soon every single feature in the browser will have a pop up saying "Do you want to allow losing <img>?", "Do you want to allow use of "cursor css style?", etc.

SVG is smaller in a vast majority of those cases and looks better to boot

SVG can have non svg images inside of it.

SVG has autoplaying animation possibilities.

SVG has JavaScript if you are putting it directly into the body of the page.

You can also put anything into SVG with the foreign object element, so also videos.

So yes if someone stopped me abusing the users with my autoplaying videos I might decide to abuse them with SVG before these other options.

I didn't think about that. That's depressing.

Using a browser from an ad company will do that to you

You can turn off GIF animation in Chrome, you are still downloading the giantass GIF. Slowing down canvas repaints if one of your overall goals is web applications that have feature and performance parity with desktop ones is, I think, unlikely. I'm a bit more surprised Google (and all browser vendors) aren't more proactive in just killing off animated GIFs.

Except animated GIFs are the only way to have embedded "video" in Google Slides.

(Yes, you can technically "embed" YouTube videos, but they play in the YouTube player with all of its chrome and only in widescreen with letterboxing if your aspect ratio doesn't fit)

Both are made by Google so this feels like one of the easier things Google can fix. Twitter and FB are essentially aGIF-less and they don't even make popular browsers!

Facebook plays gif in its native format and it doesn’t autoplay.

That's why they suggest to use <video> for replacing GIF.

> perhaps frequent canvas repaints too;

Which touches on something that drives me insane. Browsers are reinventing the OS and they are leaving out all the tools useful for managing one's computer. I should be able to identify which tab is using tons of CPU. Which tabs are using lots of RAM. I should be able to stop a particular bit of script (aka process.) WTF do I get a pop up telling me a script may be causing a page to be slow, but nothing identifying which of the five to six tabs in my eight to ten browser windows it is?

Another thing that would be nice is if I had a setting in the browser that allowed me to specify how many ms/sec a script is allowed to run. It would be pleasant to be able to limit scripts to 1 ms per second of run time.

I agree with you in principle but is more nuanced than that, lets say an user taps a link they think goes to a gif, according to you there should be a play button over the gif? You would be killing a lot of traffic for that site because that annoys users, or imagine a site with infinite scroll (ala twitter) with funny gifs, should the user have to click each single gif they want to watch? Plus keep in mind the users would save a lot of (maybe costly) bandwidth and battery if they used muted videos instead of GIFS so why use them?