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To Conserve Bandwidth, Should Opting In Be Required Before Autoplaying Videos? (fatherly.com) 103

An anonymous reader writes: We keep seeing stories about how providers are slowing down their streaming speed to reduce bandwidth usage during this period when many are being asked to stay at home... But it seems that many are totally ignoring a very obvious way to reduce usage significantly, and that is by disabling autoplay on their web sites and in their apps.

To give an example, a couple of days ago I was watching a show on Hulu, and either I was more sleepy than I thought or the show was more boring than I had expected (probably some combination of both), but I drifted off to sleep. Two hours later I awoke and realize that Hulu had streamed two additional episodes that no one was watching. I searched in vain for a way to disable autoplay of the next episode, but if there is some way to do it I could not find it.

What I wonder is how many people even want autoplay? I believe Netflix finally gave their users a way to disable it, but they need to affirmatively do so via a setting somewhere. But many other platforms give their users no option to disable autoplay. That is also true of many individual apps that can be used on a Roku or similar device. If conserving bandwidth is really that important, then my contention is that autoplaying of the next episode should be something you need to opt in for, not something enabled by default that either cannot be disabled or that forces the user to search for a setting to disable.

"Firefox will disable autoplay," writes long-time Slashdot user bobs666 (adding "That's it use Firefox.") And there are ways to disable autoplay in the user settings on Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, and Amazon Prime.

But wouldn't it make more sense to disable autoplay by default -- at least for the duration of this unusual instance of peak worldwide demand?

I'd be interested in hearing from Slashdot's readers. Do you use autoplay -- or have you disabled it? And do you think streaming companies should turn it off by default?
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To Conserve Bandwidth, Should Opting In Be Required Before Autoplaying Videos?

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  • Yes, of course (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fustakrakich ( 1673220 ) on Saturday March 28, 2020 @03:36PM (#59882618) Journal

    Why do we need autoplaying videos?

    Rhetorical question

    • Re:Yes, of course (Score:5, Insightful)

      by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Saturday March 28, 2020 @03:40PM (#59882628)
      We don't, but I'm pretty sure YouTube wants to keep playing videos so they can keep showing ads. I don't think they particularly care if anyone actually watches them. Non ad-based companies probably like to tout the increased play-count and try to pass it off as more "engagement" with their platform than they actually have.
      • Re:Yes, of course (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Mitreya ( 579078 ) <mitreya.gmail@com> on Saturday March 28, 2020 @05:13PM (#59882858)

        We don't, but I'm pretty sure YouTube wants to keep playing videos so they can keep showing ads.

        I get that.
        What I don't understand is why half of the news website articles have to play a video. And when I scroll down as I read the article, the video will jump and scroll on the side, while it autoplays. What do they get out of it? It's not an ad.

        • Re:Yes, of course (Score:5, Insightful)

          by LucasBC ( 1138637 ) on Saturday March 28, 2020 @05:41PM (#59882920)

          I also hate it when the video follows you down the page. As to why they do it? It's an attempt to "increase engagement". i.e. They believe you'll stay on the site longer if something is there for you to watch while you're reading. A naive belief, in my opinion; it makes me want to leave the site faster.

          Another reason is simply that owners/developers see it on other sites and think "it's cool". It's not.)

          • by sjames ( 1099 )

            This exactly. If I wanted to watch the video, I wouldn't have scrolled down to read TFA. Even worse when it just keeps autoplaying unrelated video while I'm trying to find a whole square inch not plastered over with the stalker video and ads I can read the text through.

            In most cases it encourages me to click elsewhere, possibly googling the topic hoping for a less annoying source of information. Failing that, if I really want to know, I pop open the inspector and delete the floating video from the page.

          • Well, they are right. It takes time to find out how the heck to turn that damn video off, increaseing your staying time on the page because while you try to figure out how to get rid of the crap, you're not reading.

        • >What do they get out of it? It's not an ad.
          Are you sure about that? I've noticed an awful lot of "sponsored content" in such videos - that's not just random video from another news story, somebody paid them to have you watch a piece of scripted cinema disguised as a news piece.

          • I don't use he stock subscription filters, as I'm out to stop blinking and tracking, not ads.

            But I would *sure* like a subscription that blocks all video player content, and another that blocks all "sponsored" or "partner" content (including those that pay to beat the search engine on amazon and the like).

            hawk

        • I agree. I clicked on an article about local park and greenway closures, and a video of football quarterback Drew Brees began to play. uBlock Origin doesn't seem to block it on its own, despite my best attempts.
      • YouTube when on the site is one thing. You only go there to watch videos.

        My main problem is all the news sites that put an unrelated video on their news stories that starts playing after you have scrolled past it, and you end up having to scroll around the page trying to find it to stop it.

        • Most browsers give a mute button on every tab that playing audio. It's very handy for shutting up some random video you can't find on the page.

          • Some of us, out in the boondocks have to pay for bandwidth, so it's not just about muteing.

          • Mute is nice, but if it is still playing it is still eating bandwidth and using data. Given there are users who are paying for data, and the current bandwidth crunch specifically? Autoplay needs to at least temporarily be an automatic opt-in.
      • We don't, but I'm pretty sure YouTube wants to keep playing videos so they can keep showing ads.

        They want to, but they don't do it on my computer. Between my ad blocker and a Greasemonkey script provided by some kind stranger in the relatively distant past, I just don't have to put up with that shit. Pure bliss - no autoplay on initial loading, and no autoplay of whatever YT's twisted little algorithms think I should watch next. And given that I may have dozens of YT tabs open at any one time, online life for me would be unmanageable without these measures.

        I HATE having my online experience managed by

      • I don't think they particularly care if anyone actually watches them.

        That's half true....advertisers pay a lot of attention to the conversion rate, and if they don't make enough profit from the youtube ads, then the advertisers will look elsewhere.

        I once worked for a video ad company, and one day they were very happy because they got a LOT of clicks for their customers (advertisers). Turned out it was just a UI bug that 'tricked' people into clicking on it, and the conversion rate was very very low, so those advertisers were very upset.

        At the same time, these ad compani

      • Actually, YouTube does not play the video until you open the tab containing the video, so they are actually one of the few that do it kinda right.

      • For the next few launches, 20% of the satellite in each swarm will be be a bit different.

        When the regular swarm notes the transmission of an autoplay video, it will be backtracked to its source.

        One of the "special" satellites will then activate, calculate timing and orbit, and return to earth for kinetic kill of the offending server.

        hawk

    • We didn't need auto-play advertisements on broadcast television for the last half century. We mostly tolerated them in order to get more free shit, but we didn't strictly need them.

      • "More"? Try "any".

        There's really only two business models that exist for non-enrypted broadcast television: Ads, and public funding - via either government or pledge drives. Or a few wealthy patrons I suppose, but then you really have to ask what their motives are. It's not cheap to run a television station.

        • Thanks for stating the obvious, PBS is over 50 years old.

          Perhaps you can think of other examples of "free shit" in our lives, outside of broadcast television.

    • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

      What's even worse IMO is the stupid mobile browsers that will either autoplay or start downloading a video in anticipation of you wanting to watch it before you even know there's a video to watch. OK, youtube is the worst, it will happily play videos back to back until your data allowance is all used up even they obviously know you're using a phone to view a video.

      They haven't changed this for coronavirus, shows that they don't really care, profit comes first.

  • I think we know the answer, I would also add audio.

    And for Ads, that should be the case along with audio and pictures. And marketing people wonder why everyone is using ad-blockers everywhere they can.

  • The streamers have automatically downgraded video quality for the time being. Add this idea to the pile, and it'll save a little. Most work apps don't clog connections as much as video does.

    • Curious fact is I have not changed my Youtube settings for a long time, and the videos I watch all default to 1080p60fps, just like before Youtube announcing quality reduction. I have changed no settings, and neither have they.
      Could this reduction be geofenced? Applied for some countries but not others?

      • It changed for mobile browser. I don't know if mobile browsers make up a the bulk of YouTube's bandwidth though?

        • Nope, I've been watching a lot of YouTube on my Android device today. Still 1080 by default (at least the YouTube app, but YouTube videos tend to default load in the app even when selected in a browser)
      • Maybe there's a "default" settings that stays true until a user actually changes it in his account or something - if they even have an account - and only those with that default setting are being sent 480p automatically?

  • Are you crazy? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Saturday March 28, 2020 @03:43PM (#59882640)

    "But wouldn't it make more sense to disable autoplay by default -- at least for the duration of this unusual instance of peak worldwide demand?"

    You want to force several billion people, forced to sit on their couch to press a button twice an hour?

    • Good point! Do you know how many sandwiches with peanut butter we save if we leave it on!?
      • All I know is that a lot of people are allergic to peanuts, so the only sensible thing to do in order to save more lives is to keep autoplay enabled.

    • You want to force several billion people, forced to sit on their couch to press a button twice an hour?

      When we emerge from this, we would at least have several thumb muscle cells left. These could then be surgically cloned into other parts of the body.

    • Given how many news sites have autoplay videos, like I really want to watch their long ass introductions and recap of the written article I was looking for, assuming that it's even about the subject and not their running line or whatever, I'm forced to press MORE buttons to stop it. Hell, I'm tempted to send them bills for my bandwidth.

      Yes, bring on the end of autoplaying videos. At least listen to my browser setting.

    • Yes, it's the only exercise they get.
  • by MS ( 18681 ) on Saturday March 28, 2020 @03:55PM (#59882666)

    Autoplay of videos or sound in webpages has never been a good idea.
    It should have been disabled by default from the beginning.

    • THIS. I have autoplay disabled in Firefox because it's the only sane thing to do.
    • Unfortunately it is not just autoplay. You can disable autoplay on video in Firefox settings, but that does not prevent JS code to start playing the video. In order to really disable autoplay, one has to disable JS (e.g. by NoScript).

    • by Resuna ( 6191186 )

      I get a lot of people whinging about how they like the Autoplay in Youtube, where after playing the origianal video it goes on to play more. o_O

      That's not what we're talking about here though, and I dearly wish YT had come up with a better term because it sure muddies the water.

      • There is an Autoplay toggle button in the upper right corner area of the youtube video's page, works on every video on youtube except if you click on a video in a playlist.

    • Unfortunately, you are wrong.

      Autoplay was the default behavior of the original device -- the television. Turn it on, watch all day.

      We here are a very tiny minority of intellectuals. The vast majority of people out there get mildly irritated every time they have to search for the remote that got lost in the couch cushions since the last time they paused something to go to the bathroom. Hell, I know people who don't even bother to pause it. Too much trouble, and they're not following the "story" anyway. It's

  • by Anonymous Coward

    The worst is when videos cause audio ducking or outright stopping the music/podcast I was listening to. It's obtrusive and unnecessary. Most of the time I scroll past the video before it even starts playing and then it still plays even though I'm looking nowhere near it. It's a waste all the time, nevermind during emergencies. It wastes my battery and is a PITA.

    • by slazzy ( 864185 )
      Some browsers let you disable this, I think Opera and Firefox. It's worth switching.
      • So our choices are a browser controlled by China, or a browser who's now in bed with advertisers. Or Chrome, which is owned by an advertising company.

        I'll stick with Safari, thank you very much.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday March 28, 2020 @04:06PM (#59882696)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I'm not sure what precious bandwidth you're talking about. In the past 3 weeks this household has downloaded roughly 80GB of binge-watched Netflix, 320GB of game releases on 2 PCs, nothing on Pornhub which is currently offering free premium membership according to a friend. ;-), and maybe 0.05GB of adverts mostly in the form of auto playing videos which are stopped or skipped within seconds.

      • I'm not sure what precious bandwidth you're talking about.

        Some people in my circles live in a place unserved by any fiber or cable provider and are thus stuck on satellite or fixed cellular. These services operate over a narrow slice of spectrum shared by all subscribers in an area and thus have to limit each subscriber to a quota of tens of GB per month. After this, subscribers get either severely rate-limited or billed for overages, depending on the plan details.

  • I'm being facetious, but if developers just learned the basics of web development and did not rely on libraries and tons of dependencies to build a simple site, that alone would probably save countless petabytes of wasted bandwidth each day. Then we could put that towards more time wasting streaming services.
    • Not only petabytes of wasted bandwidth, but all the energy required to run all these damn libraries.

      Vanilla JS [vanilla-js.com]

      • All that Javascript takes a while to parse. A website with several megabytes of Javascript takes longer to parse the Javascript than to download it.
  • by sizzlinkitty ( 1199479 ) on Saturday March 28, 2020 @04:10PM (#59882702)

    We need to stop the massive amounts of ad networks slushing down our data or tracking us across the web. Disabling the extra crap would save way more bandwidth than disabling auto play on streaming services.

    • We need to stop the massive amounts of ad networks slushing down our data or tracking us across the web. Disabling the extra crap would save way more bandwidth than disabling auto play on streaming services.

      Ublock actual origin? I mean, at the provider?

    • Disabling the extra crap would save way more bandwidth

      Not sure what you're smoking, but when a single game release clocks in at 100GB, binge watching Netflix consumes many GB per day, the most autistic data analyst couldn't identify the bandwidth wasted by adverts and extra crap.

      Disable ads to make pages load faster, make your internet more secure, and to reduce tracking, not for some pie in the sky stupid reason.

  • but I drifted off to sleep. Two hours later I awoke and realize that Hulu had streamed two additional episodes that no one was watching... If conserving bandwidth is really that important, then my contention...

    Be careful of that slippery slope you're sliding down or you may be facing charges for sleeping while streaming -- bandwidth is a terrible thing to waste.

    I think people not turning off their TV while straining must be pretty uncommon and a small waste of overall bandwidth -- if there really was a need to reduce bandwidth across the country (I'm not convinced there is, reports of providers struggling to keep up are relatively rare), then having the major providers reduce the default quality of all streams wo

    • People sleep every day, people stream every day. I don't imagine it's that uncommon. It's happened to me multiple times in the past month.

      But what's even worse, happened to me multiple times in the past hour, are auto-playing ads or "content" that I don't want on web pages. I'm pretty sure this is the reason Chrome is the only competitor with Youtube for bandwidth usage on my phone, being that I never deliberately stream anything in Chrome.

      • by hawguy ( 1600213 )

        People sleep every day, people stream every day. I don't imagine it's that uncommon. It's happened to me multiple times in the past month.

        But what's even worse, happened to me multiple times in the past hour, are auto-playing ads or "content" that I don't want on web pages. I'm pretty sure this is the reason Chrome is the only competitor with Youtube for bandwidth usage on my phone, being that I never deliberately stream anything in Chrome.

        I have never fallen asleep while streaming. Don't you see that you're part of the problem of this rampant waste of bandwidth? Every byte of bandwidth lost to sleeping while streaming is a byte of bandwidth that's lost forever, it can never be restored. If you stacked all of those bytes up end to end, they'd reach to.... well, I don't know how far they reach but I bet it's pretty far.

        I'd guess that most sleeping-while-streaming incidents happen at night when bandwidth usage is low, the bigger problem is duri

    • Auto-playing videos are super annoying but you don't need to invoke COVID-19 to make that case.

      I disagree. We should be giving COVID-19 to all the people that record annoying videos.

  • There are two types of autoplay. The first one is that a video on a page starts playing when you load the page. It is wildly annoying, and I disable it where ever and however I can.

    The other is the one you see on many streaming services, where it automatically selects a "next video" that is started without user interaction. If it is just the next episode of the TV show I'm watching, it is just annoying. But on youtube and especially fb, it is often some random crap, that I *really* don't need to see. Fb in

  • by McLae ( 606725 ) on Saturday March 28, 2020 @04:17PM (#59882714) Homepage
    Just saw an autoplaying advertisement. And they are cycling through. Nice pics of half undressed ladies, but nothing I will buy. And this is on slashdot. Let's start here.
  • Yes (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ruddk ( 5153113 ) on Saturday March 28, 2020 @04:17PM (#59882716)

    they only reason videos are auto-playing is so that they can inflate their viewer numbers and get more ad revenue when they negotiate their worth.
    If it is a video you would want to watch, you are going to press that play button.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      How does it push them in analytics when the client has volume on mute and is not even scrolled to the video on the page? This is what the case is 99% of the time.

  • Argh! (Score:5, Funny)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Saturday March 28, 2020 @04:23PM (#59882724)

    Damn you, Betteridge!

    • No no no It's still okay. We should *not* be disabling autoplaying videos to conserve bandwidth. ... I got a fuckload of other reasons why we should disable them, but so far Betteridge is still okay.

  • Network operators need to upgrade. If you don't use the bandwidth, then you are telling them not to upgrade. They only build the capacity you use. A fast network comes from using the bandwidth, not from "conserving" it.
  • I always disable it because if I fall asleep or get pulled away without stopping playback, continuing to play episodes in my absence causes multiple problems. It skews the tracking of what I have and have not watched, being able to see which episodes I've seen is pretty useless if half of a season of a TV show played to nobody. Autoplay, to save a single click to see the next episode, literally costs me money because I want my playback device and my TV to use their preconfigured power saving settings to shu

  • "Two hours later I awoke and realize that Hulu had streamed two additional episodes that no one was watching. I searched in vain for a way to disable autoplay of the next episode, but if there is some way to do it I could not find it."

    Uh... did you check "Settings"? In Hulu it's, like, the *only* setting.

  • All of the news coverage over ISPs limiting services to "save bandwidth" is more than likely BS. It's a great way for the ISPs to show that caps and paying for extra bandwidth is needed. If they did nothing while so many more people are accessing the Internet it would prove they were full of BS all along.
  • I don't mind if videos autoload on Netflix or YouTube. I'm there to actually watch the videos. I hate it when videos autoload on news sites, where I want to read the article, not watch some video that runs next to it.
    • What's even worst is that those auto-playing videos on the news sites are either the exact text you're trying to read - and only people in kindergarten can't read faster than the videos - or it's a video about an entirely different topic that you don't care about, making it even more wasteful.

  • I wish news sites in particular would stop this. CNN in particular is bad at this.

    It's really annoying that the videos play on nearly every page and there does not seem to be a way to (natively) turn it off. The videos play but I keep sound on the computer muted so I don't have to listen to it, but it wastes bandwidth. The mobile app also included auto-play videos, which is why I removed it a long time ago.

    I do also check out Fox News and while they have video on every page, they at least have a global sett

    • Yeah.. I was gonna say.. I don't care so much about the bandwidth, but anything to shut CNN up when I just want to read news.

      I've generally tried to stick to other sites because of this behavior, but sometimes I still end up following a link that goes there..

  • The tech that plays videos also powers ads, so the marketing wanks don't want it disabled. Most the browser makers are on board with supporting big biz, not you. The autoplaying will continue

  • There's just too much "auto" everything on web pages, and none of them I asked to run on my computer. I want control of my web browser. If I don't want it on my screen then it should be easy to get rid of it.

    I'll do some web surfing, have to step away from my computer for a bit, and when I come back my computer is essentially locked up from all the crap running in the browser. Just yesterday I came to one of my computers and it was running hot and I was having trouble unlocking the screen because something was taking a lot of CPU time. After I was able to log in I found that some web page was running some kind of script that had the computer running all out. It was difficult to know where it was coming from because my computer was not letting me do much of anything until I started closing web browser tabs, some of which were unreadable from all the auto-play crap in them.

    My web browser should simply not be capable of taking so much CPU. If I see some video element running then I should be able to kill it with a mouse click. If there's some sound playing then I should be able to stop it. All too often I find I'd like to read a simple news article but there's so much advertising trying to run video, or whatever it is that they do, that my computer can't keep up and I can't even scroll through the page.

    Before someone accuses me of just having an old and slow computer I'll say I found this on every computer I own, from an old dual core MacBook Pro with 6 GB RAM to a 12 core Dell server with 36 GB RAM repurposed as a Linux desktop. What ever computer I use some of these web pages simply take all the CPU it can find. I thought getting a faster computer would help but that only seems to make it worse.

    This is insanity that web pages have become so large and are taking so much CPU to use. I've found ways to limit some of this madness but I should not have to. I should not see my computer become unresponsive because of a badly written script on a web page, or because there's so many auto-play video advertisements running that my computer effectively becomes a space heater.

    When I first started creating web pages at university I learned that everything was supposed to be considered a suggestion. I could specify the color of the background, the formatting of some text, the size of an image, but this was considered a suggestion that the web browser could ignore or the user could override. Now it seems it's all or nothing. If scripts are disabled, or some "vital" plug-in was not installed, then the page will not load or it becomes unreadable. Just a simple news article or spec sheet can be buried in so much scripting and formatting that there's seemingly a gigabyte of junk for information that could have been just printed out on a single page.

    Being able to universally disable auto-play should just be the start of getting back control of our web browsers.

    • Then maybe you should change the start up of your browser and put "nice" in front of the command so it doesn't take up all the CPU. You could even do "nice +20". :)

      That was the only way I could think of until I went and looked and found a command called "cpulimit", which sounds kind of cool. The blog went on to mention "cgroups" can help with this too. Thanks for motivating me to go find and learn 2 new commands.
      • Then maybe you should change the start up of your browser and put "nice" in front of the command so it doesn't take up all the CPU. You could even do "nice +20". :)

        Why should I even have to? Shouldn't the people that create the web browsers know enough to make a browser that can behave itself? Should not the browser not lock me out of some basic preferable behavior like auto-play of audio and video? This is not a new problem. People have been complaining of browsers allowing advertisements opening pop-up windows, pop-under windows, and so much more for decades.

        Getting a web browser to behave should not take this level of knowledge. The browser should simply be ab

        • I agree, you shouldn't have to. Still, there is a work around until it gets fixed (yes, I'm being an optimist and there's no evidence it will ever get fixed).
    • This is insanity that web pages have become so large and are taking so much CPU to use.

      Computers from 2000 were perfectly capable of displaying the web of 2000. But over the past two decades, advertisers have become stingier on a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) basis so as not to "waste" money on what they deem futile messaging.

      - Advertisers pay less for ad space unless it's in an attention-getting format. This explains the shift from stills or slow GIF slideshows to video.
      - Advertisers pay less for ad space unless it's microtargeted to a viewer's interests, so as not to "waste" ad spend

  • by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Saturday March 28, 2020 @05:19PM (#59882872)

    >"To Conserve Bandwidth, Should Opting In Be Required Before Autoplaying Videos?"

    It has just as much about not being ANNOYING AS HELL as it does saving bandwidth and power.

    I spent a lot of time using settings to stop all web autoplaying in Firefox (I mean *ALL*, not just "unmuted") for web sites. Now it is much easier than it used to be, but there are STILL sites that "break" because of it.

    >"To give an example, a couple of days ago I was watching a show on Hulu, and either I was more sleepy"

    This happened to me ALL THE TIME on Netflix. Wasted tons of data and frustrating to try and figure out which episode I was watching when I fell asleep. It took Netflix how long to give us an option to turn that crap off? And then it is not defaulted that way AND they hide it- it isn't in the client interface anywhere, you have to go into your account and look for it. Even now, it still doesn't stop all "autoplay", it starts playing an episode when I look at the info about it, even though I didn't press play. But at least it doesn't just go from episode to episode for hour after hour. It also doesn't stop the annoying, constant "pan/zoom" animation in the main UI.

    >"What I wonder is how many people even want autoplay?"

    NOBODY. There might be some people who don't care, but I suspect nobody actually WANTS autoplay. How hard it is to press ONE BUTTON at the end of a show, 30 to 120 minutes later, if you want to see something else?

    >"But wouldn't it make more sense to disable autoplay by default"

    Yes

    • If it's putting you to sleep, it sounds more like the wrong *show* than the wrong episode . . .

      hawk

      • If it's putting you to sleep, it sounds more like the wrong *show* than the wrong episode . . ."

        LOL. Nothing keeps me awake, at times I am just "gone."

  • One of my pet peeves is Youtube keeps turning back on autoplay periodically. If I want to watch a Youttube video it is just that 'a' video, not some random crap after it, so I always turn off autoplay. Yet every so often it will magically get turned back on. I don't know how much is the setting being stored somewhere somewhat volatile so it gets lost with a browser update etc or if Youtube are doing it deliberately but I am damn sure they could have it a permanent user preference and it is a deliberate t
  • Can netflix also stop autoplaying adds for the video we've stopped on for 2 seconds while you adjust your scrotum. FFS. I need to switch to boxers.
  • It's that simple: People should use Firefox by default. Why the hell not?
    Is there some specific reason everybody feels they must be loyal Google serfs? (I'm sorry, that's Alphabet serf)
    If we remove that assumption, why isn't Firefox exactly suitable as "default"?
    There's plenty of other reasons why Firefox is a good browser to use. Why is this hard?

    • It's that simple: People should use Firefox by default. Why the hell not?

      Good luck running Firefox on the Chromebook that someone else has given to you. And because of Apple's restrictions, the Firefox app for iOS and iPadOS is Firefox in name only, as it merely wraps the same browser engine that Safari uses.

      Also, good luck using Skype in Firefox, or any other web application whose publisher has made a business decision to remain Chrome-only.

  • Not bandwidth. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by edibobb ( 113989 ) on Saturday March 28, 2020 @07:41PM (#59883218) Homepage
    Autoplay should be opt-in to conserve sanity, not bandwidth.
  • by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Saturday March 28, 2020 @08:28PM (#59883338)

    When I read the title, I thought it would be about ads. You know, those little pop-up ad windows that play a video at you & follow you around while you're trying to read an article. What's the point in that?

    Yes, I want that disabled by any means necessary. I don't think I'm alone in this sentiment.

    P.S. Weren't all the annoying ads supposed to be banished when they got rid of Flash? I guess it wasn't Flash's fault after all.

  • Firefox lets you disable the dreaded autoplay. Fine. Except that it doesn't always work. I find that many media websites have managed to bypass the controls and autoplay their audio and video no matter what I set in my preferences. Making "no autoplay" the default would be great. Making the "no autoplay" option actually work all the time would be sufficient, though.

  • Yes, yes, yes, holy Crom yes!

    Seriously, this should just be one of those web-standards. NO video or Audio should EVER auto-play, unless the person has CHOSEN to opt-in.

  • Music apps no longer know what to create to create our needs ... I don't have automatic playback disabled, it's unnecessary for me I do not use it on this site either and it seems absurd to update the apps without having a productive purpose 123movies.llc [webspaceconfig.de] I don't understand too much either

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