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 is good news. Auto-play is one of those things, together with pay-walls, that make me close the window immediately and never return to that site again.
As someone who primarily surfs on a mobile device subject to data limits…
Give me a gavel, and I’ll judge them good and hard across the kneecaps.
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I hate autoplay videos even more than embedded MIDI.