[lxgr]

On the other hand, in a typical Netflix binging scenario, this would cause tens of gigabytes of avoidable SSD writes.

Especially for mobile devices with fairly small storage sizes, this can easily represent a sizable fraction of their total write endurance.

[account42]

So maybe be a bit smarter about it. The browser will know if the video is set to loop unless that is done with JS. In all cases it will know if it has looped and can start caching then.

And just you don't need to limit all devices by the lowest common denominator either.

[lxgr]

> unless that is done with JS.

Which is the entire point of the article: Most of the time even trivial video playback is done using JS due to the shortcomings of the <video> tag itself! This also means that browsers are unable to perform such optimizations.

> And just you don't need to limit all devices by the lowest common denominator either.

Unless the video site is intentionally sending cache control headers preventing caching of the video assets, this behavior is presumably already caused by the browser itself, not the site.