I genuinely do not understand the artist in the replies who says this has destroyed their work. Can't the website require you to click/tap once to start its thing, without negative impact? I feel like I must be missing something. (There's a mention about not updating code for existing work, which might be it?)
For context,here’s how I had to work around this to get autoplaying audio to work on iOS Safari for an educational VR experience I was building:
I start by asking a user whether they want to view the experience in “Stereo Mode” or “Normal Mode”. Whatever they click on, I use that click event to start playing a 500ms long mp3 of silence. When that clip finishes, I use its ‘ended’ event to start it up again. Meanwhile in the render loop, if the user enters an area where I have some auto playing narration, I set a global flag and store the track name in a global variable. Those flags get picked up the next time the 500ms track finishes, and the named track is substituted in.
This is ridiculous, and this is just to play sound files at various points in time. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that some of Cabbibo’s work uses multiple Audio Contexts or other complicating factors that would make it difficult to retrofit.
I'm frustrated too but it's not really that hard. iOS (and Android) have had restrictions for years. My audio library just attaches an event listener to window for touchstart and mousedown and plays one silent sound via the webaudio API. One started there's no need to do it again.
Of course revisiting 10-50 old projects to make them work again is very frustrating
So I tried to explore the site as a firefox user, this is the type of stuff I get: Big warning and messages to install Google Chrome [1][2] without even then attempting to give it a shot in firefox for some demos from what I can tell (I may be mistaken, perhaps firefox is breaking still).
Given the impressive amount of work they put into the site, it's unfortunate a few lines of feature detection and polyfills weren't placed in there, because maybe then this could be a `sed -i /install google chrome/install Firefox/` fixup.
(I say that on the presumption that firefox is now able to handle the multimedia stuff which has been my personal experience with it, though not quite at the same level as the artist, just some pitch shifts and hand rolled synth stuff).
Yeah I tried using Firefox too on one of the sites, it didn't go well. No content, enabled JS, a brief menu with some sound effects popped up, then the whole page changed into an invalid HTTPS cert page as if I triggered a redirect or a script tried to load a resource or something else, apparently they're trying to use a github-domain-only cert and I'd have to add an exception. I left at that point.
The artist reaction makes him come across as a primadonna. It's not like there aren't thousands of art projects made from Java applets that either flat out don't work anymore or require an absurd amount of manual steps to get working. The effort he'd need to make to keep things working (which is generally a given for so much of software) is quite a bit less than those artists who banked on the Java (or hell, even Flash) horse.
The artist in question has been pioneering online interactive experiences for years, and through his work (and possibly directly) helped shape the APIs and prompt browser adoption of new standards used.
If you get a "use chrome" message, it's most likely not because the artist is evil, but rather that the experience used tech only available in chrome at the time the work was done.
As an artist, the whole point is to keep exploring and creating. It's not the same as a 9 to 5 where you maintain a company website etc. Going back and adjusting the flow for each experience would be the equivalent of asking pavers to go back and add a bit of plastic to each section of concrete they've laid down for the last five years.
I think the strong reaction comes from the fact that this change was sprung with very little, if any, warning.
I'm an artist and if I want people to be able to access my work I have to do boring stuff to make that happen. I'm thinking of technical stuff like (as a painter) taking good quality photos of my work, fixing colour accuracy of those photos in software, writing code to process images into various sizes etc. Sometimes browsers change and I have to go and change my websites accordingly. But it doesn't have to be technical, artists might spend time organising exhibitions, making canvases, sourcing materials.
Yes, as an artist the whole point is to keep exploring and creating. But unfortunately you still have to do things like pay bills and go to the toilet just like "the others".
This stuff goes alongside and is complementary to the creative work. None of it is present in my mind when I'm working on a painting because I'm in the zone. But if you want to do something with your work other than letting it sit in storage you have to do the other bits too. Thinking you shouldn't have to do any of this extra stuff is prima-donna-ish in my opinion.
I don't think the artist is evil, it does sound like particularly annoying stuff for him to have to deal with. But as an individual user I personally never want any sound or video autoplaying on a website, ever, for any reason. Give me a button to click. For extra non-hatred, don't use a dark pattern.
I understand that creators might say "if you're on my site you're there for the full experience". This is what everyone who ever builds anything thinks though, that their thing is the exception, it really is ok just in this one case. No sorry, this is the internet, all someone has done to end up at your site is click a link, they might not know what it is, maybe they're listening to an amazing album on their great sound system via their computer and don't want it interrupted by bleeps. They might be at work, or surfing in bed with somebody asleep next to them.
I guess the new Chrome policy will be ok for most people but it's going to be yet another annoyance for me. I seem to never fit into the way AI/ML does its predictions and rather than save me a click it usually ends up making me click more as I try to tell it how wrong it is and then try to coerce it into doing what I want. I'm going to hate the future.
Who in this thread has said anything about being evil?
Art needs maintenance just like everything else if you want it experienced beyond the time of its initial debut. Depending on the art, sometimes more, sometimes less. Not really a 9-5 thing unless maintaining others' art is your full time job.
This particular case is more akin to a game engine update changing some APIs, or perhaps akin to converting some archaic RealMedia material to modern formats. The art in question having software as medium matters a lot.
It's ugly and would require going back and modifying all their existing work, is my understanding. According to the docs I saw, any code which expects to be able to just create an audio device at load and start using it will have its audio break completely, by design, and no amount of clicking or interacting will make it come back unless the code is designed to handle this.
Adding a "click to start the experience" button changes the experience. In particular, some users might not see the button if it's subtle, and be unimpressed or think the site is broken. And if the button is not subtle that's bad too.
It's also annoying to have to do such a change to your art for a single browser.
Overall I think the artist's frustration is understandable, but I agree "destroyed" is perhaps too strong a word.
That probably works for crosswalks at intersections, but there are other crosswalks with lights. I found a really nice one that turns the lights yellow as soon as you push the button.
I don't have as many webaudio sites as cabbibo but I can imagine that like me he wanted to get new work done today rather than re-visit 20-50 old projects and spend a 1-10 days updating them all to run.
On the other hand I'm happy that ads can't easily play sounds. I do wish youtube had to play by the same rules.
The artist in question has hundreds of pieces of work, many of which he may not have easy (if any) access to anymore. It would take a non-trivial amount of work to fix.
But I think he’s also expressing doubt about creating art/work on the web in the future because of things like this.
It only because of user hostile choices made by browser vendors that it was ever a viable option to begin with and it was a bad bet to think it would last, although Google seems to be doing anything they can to keep things the way they are without directly saying "we'd rather you not be able to stop all media because our business model is to get in your face". No one deserves the unrestrained ability to enter your home and interrupt you in the name of commerce, entertainment, art, or anything else, except maybe emergency.
I agree though it would also be likely if he made them native apps they would stop working as well. Lots of native apps on all platforms stop working without updates. The latest for me is Photoshop CS6 which has a 32bit service that MacOS tells me will cease to function soon >:(
Chrome should have some UI that shows that the tab is muted, and they should have a control somewhere so the user can un-mute the page. Currently when I go to one of those pages, there's no way for me to unmute the page at all.