[Gaelan]

Cynicism aside, YouTube is a typical example of a good use for autoplay. A user clicking a link to YT almost always wants to watch the video. "Predictable" probably wasn't the right word for them to use, but I think this is a reasonable move by Google.

[qu4z-2]

Youtube is the worst, because not only does it autoplay, but for the first 2s or so it's faffing around with JavaScript so no matter what you do in that time it will subsequently start playing. Like, it'll show up as "playing" and you pause it, then leave the tab, and like a second later the video will start despite your having paused it.

(for the record, at least half the time I open a youtube video I don't want it to play immediately)

[sincerely]

i'm not sure if this is something on my end or google's, but i've noticed that in the past few weeks whenever I open a youtube video in a new tab (staying in the current tab), it won't play until i switch to the new one.

[zaarn]

Firefox definitely does this, though it doesn't stop autoplay when opening youtube on a new tab (I'm okay with autoplay on the same tab, ie directly navigating videos or autoplay function in youtube itself.

[qu4z-2]

I've noticed that too, and it helps, but I tend to navigate with Ctrl(+Shift)+Tab, so eventually I'll briefly skip over it and it'll start playing.

[zaarn]

I don't want YouTube to autoplay, most of the time, I'm opening a lot of YT tabs at once and sometimes I need to seek out a specific one I am interested in most.

It would be much nicer if the various plugins I use to control that behaviour wouldn't stop working every 4 months due to another youtube redesign (whether in UI or Backend on the Client).

[bscphil]

The sane behavior would be to not autoplay video in tabs that open in the background. (I thought this was the default behavior in Firefox, but maybe not?) Other than that, the only solution is some kind of heuristic. If the reason someone clicks on the page is to play a video, it should autoplay: the click registers my intent. If the page serves some other purpose (channels on Youtube come to mind), nothing should autoplay.

[ripdog]

Firefox does this by default. Background tabs do not autoplay, but the foreground tab does.

[Macha]

Huh, I thought this was a behaviour YouTube/twitch did manually as it doesn't seem 100% reliable on news sites.

[coding123]

By the same token so would youporn... But I wonder if they made the list.

[kalleboo]

Not really. I might want to watch the video but not right now. And then you have stuff like rickrolling, or just a video you want to see what it is before playing. Chrome used to even autoplay YouTube videos in background tabs, so if you cmd-clicked several videos to queue up in tabs, it would play all of them at once. Idiotic.

[Sylos]

Even with that in mind, blocking it on all sites with those few whitelisted would be simpler and more predictable.

[make3]

saying an advertisement company mostly cares about playing ads doesn't register as cynical to me.

[kalleboo]

Right. Of the main browser vendors, Safari and Edge's conflict of interest is they'd prefer people make native apps over webapps. Chrome's conflict of interest is they don't want you to block ads. Firefox is the only browser with user-aligned incentives (as long as they ignore who pays a lot of their income...)

[make3]

Hmm I guess this analysis explains why IE has sucked for so long

[kalleboo]

Microsoft has a long history of extend, embrace and extinguish, IE was just one of those.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-exec-ms-wanted-to-extend...

> It was in this meeting that Microsoft executives said they intended to "embrace, extend, extinguish" competing technologies, including Internet standard HTML, McGeady said

https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/atr/legacy/2006/...

> we will loose [sic] the Internet platform battle if we do not have a significant user installed base. The industry would simply ignore our standards. Few would write Windows apps without the Windows user base. — at your level, if you let your customers deploy Netscape Navigator, you loose [sic] the leadership on the desktop.