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Comment by fiblye | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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 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.

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.

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