[sparky_z]

I know everybody here hates flash (for excellent reasons!) and is happy to see it die. But, as a user who doesn't work in tech, I really miss the ability to enforce click-to-play loading of videos. From my pseudo-outsider perspective, the switch to HTML5 has been really frustrating.

I happen to hang out around these parts so I understand the reasons for it, but if I didn't it would probably make me mad. It would feel like websites were just trying to get around my flash blocker and shove their autoplaying media in my face. Just goes to show how different things can look from the developer side of things.

[coldpie]

Firefox has the setting "media.autoplay.enabled" for this. It mostly works, although some websites (notably Youtube) assume that autoplay succeeded and so the player acts slightly wonky, e.g. the played/paused state is backwards.

I would be interested to know of any extensions that do similar and work better.

[sparky_z]

Believe me I've looked. As far as I can tell, there's no way to make one that works for everything because the HTML5 standard* doesn't have a clear distinction between things that autoplay and things that don't, the way there was between "flash content" and "everything else".

*I'm not a tech guy so I may be using the wrong terminology here.

[coldpie]

Yes, it's a tricky problem because "what does autoplay mean?" If you load up a page containing an HTML5 game, presumably you want the background music and SFX to work. But how do we differentiate those from an unwanted autoplaying audio ad?

I believe the Firefox devs settled on anything during/after a user interaction is allowed to autoplay. More at this bug (which I've been following for years, if you couldn't tell :)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=659285

[paol]

I have autoplay disabled in FF. The trick in Youtube is to double click the play button the first time. After that all works normally. (For some reason double clicking the video area doesn't produce the same result.)

[ferrari8608]

Double clicking the video area is a shortcut for fullscreen view.

[coldpie]

It doesn't quite work "normally," the play/pause button state is backwards, but yeah, it works good enough.

[paol]

Ha, it may very well be, I never noticed.

I find a general difficulty with processing the meaning of "modal" buttons. If it's showing the "Pause" symbol, does it mean it's paused now, or that it will pause when I click it? I had the same problem with the stupid slider buttons that have become fashionable to use in place of checkboxes.

[themartorana]

We're only happy to see it die because it was never well cared for. Flash was much heavier and much, much more insecure than it needed to be with Adobe-level money behind it. They were terribly poor stewards of the technology. I mean no offense to anyone that was on the Flash team, I am making a (flawed?) presumption that it probably didn't feel great inside the company either.

Others may tell you I'm wrong - it's about standards and open technologies and whatnot. But personally (and for people I work with that I can speak for) Flash failed because Abode failed Flash.

[radley]

I agree - was definitely poor stewardship, but also there was a perceptual problem for developers. Flash was created for designers and artists, the coding part was secondary and thus traditional developers found it extremely frustrating.

The internal team became obsessed with changing it to something more focused towards developers with AS3, Flex, Flash Builder, and Flash Catalyst. Instead of improving something successful, they tried to twist it into something it wasn't.

The final straw was Jobs, not because Flash was bad but because iOS was extremely locked down. There was no way he was going to share his new platform:

"We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform."

Without iOS, there was no future for Flash (Android was still in it's infancy) so Adobe pulled the plug. Just a few years later Apple will go on to hire Kevin Lynch, former CTO of Adobe, to be VP of Technology at Apple focusing on the Apple Watch.

[guelo]

The real reason Flash died was not technical, it was because Steve Jobs didn't want a whole platform he didn't control running on the iPhone.

[CaptSpify]

well.... both really. Flash was a mess by then, but your point is also true. It would have made the app-store worthless

[Pxtl]

Yes. Jobs did it for control, but the fact that Flash was a bloated dumpster-fire of a platform made everybody else agree with him.

[samstave]

Would you say thatvthey were terribly poor stewards due to it being a product of macromedia which adobe bought and then a ton of the core group at macromedia cashed out and left after the purchase leaving tech debt vacuum at adobe wrt flash...?

[0_00_0]

What do you mean? There are extensions for blocking autoplay HTML5 media same as flash...

[sparky_z]

They don't work reliably (some things still autoplay), and sometimes they break the media entirely or don't discriminate between things you actually want to autoplay. For example, the one I currently have installed also blocks "gifv" files from autoplaying in the browser, even though there's no play button to click on. Every time I click on a reddit link that turns out to be a gifv file on imgur, it stays frozen on the first frame and I have to click on "view image", manually change the url to "gif", and reload it. As others here have mentioned, they also tend to break youtube in odd ways. It feels like there are a million little annoyances like that. Back in the "flash era", click-to-play was effortless.

[RHSeeger]

When you right click on the gifv, there should be an option to "Show Controls", which allows you to start/pause/etc it.

[sparky_z]

Holy crap, that's really helpful. Thank you!

But from the user perspective... how was I ever supposed to guess that?

[Arnavion]

FYI the exact wording depends on the browser, but all HTML5 video elements will have that context menu option. And other options like "Copy URL", "Loop", etc. depending on the browser.

Of course some websites like youtube override the context menu event to prevent that from showing.

[Zirro]

While it is hardly a discoverable feature, you can override custom context menus (at least in Firefox) by holding SHIFT and clicking.

[cyborgx7]

There is actually no such thing as a gifv "file format". gifv is just a html page with an embedded webm or mp4 file that hides the standard controls and loops automatically.

[0_00_0]

Yeah that does sound annoying. Have you tried contacting the extension maker? Perhaps they can add that to the list of fixes/features on their next update?

[cmurf]

Autoplay video on mobile makes me really angry. Both Chrome and Firefox on Android always autoplay videos on CNN, BBC, and other sites that mix video and text. All I care about 9 times out of 10 is the article, just to skim it, watching video is completely annoying and inefficient.

At first I'd yell profanities out loud. Now I stop going to those sites.

[runn1ng]

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-auto...

[sparky_z]

I may have to switch to Chrome (from Firefox) and see if actually works as described.

[runn1ng]

Firefox might have similar extensions.

It does indeed work. However, you might find that some videos don't load as they should. And, for example, gifs on facebook stop after one loop for one reason (since they are not really gifs, but videos).

But I remember similar issues with various flash-blocking extensions too.