Chrome to put hard limits on video autoplay.

It won’t be perfect, but the news that “Chrome is to block automatic play of videos with sound unless the user has indicated they are interested in such clips” is welcome anyway. It’s a trickier problem than you’d think to do anything except a flat ban of the process.  Particularly since those who inflict autoplay videos on the rest of us in the first place are also the sort of people who will actively try to get around any restrictions.

I don’t want to judge people who code autoplay videos into their pages.  There’s been a time or two where I didn’t have a choice but to put up something that autoplayed, although I always tried to put it up after the fold. But if you’re one of those advertisers or content providers… please stop, OK?  You’re increasing the amount of grimness in the universe.

…This might make me adopt Chrome.

I mean, I like Firefox, but dear God but I want this:

Google’s Chrome browser might soon be getting an easy way to tell you which open tabs are making noise, or recording it. The new feature is part of the latest Chromium build, and features a throbbing EQ animation over the noisy tab’s favicon (video below) to tell you and your system that it’s doing audio stuff. Chromium is the open source project that feeds into Google’s Chrome browser, and is often the first place that its new features show up.

Via Instapundit.  I don’t know why this isn’t built into every browser anyway, honestly.