Good, but a better idea would be to flag sites that auto play video or audio and penalize them in search.

Seriously, this is a frigging plague. I can't understand how designers rationalize the idea of blasting someone with a video or sound without their explicit approval. At the very least it is incredibly annoying. At worst it can be jarring and even inappropriate depending on time, place and context of the person doing the browser. And then there's the consumption of cellular data if you happen to be on a mobile device.

I would like search results to include a nice bright red warning saying "WARNING: Site auto-plays video or audio". Even better, drop them down to the tenth page in search results until they stop being assholes.

That will fix the problem. I don't want to have to go around a bunch of tabs and mute them.

I would like a feature that auto-closes a site that has overly obstructive ad-blocking features or sign-ups.

Off the top of my head:

-Forbes

-Washington Post

-Business Insider

I'm sure there are more, but that's a good start...

Maybe for Forbes and BI. But I doubt Google would do anything against Washington Post. Washington Post along with NYTimes and WSJ spearheaded the effort to get google to "clean up" news and youtube. Washington Post is the one who got google to whitelist or give preferential treatment to establish media and to get rid of "fake news".

I think we'll be seeing a lot more Washington Post than a lot less, especially on social media. If you get google news feed, you'll notice how different it is now than it was just a year ago. A lot more Washington Post articles and a lot less "diversity" of news sources.

Not only was Washington Post one of the leaders to "tame" social media giants like Google, FB, Twitter, Reddit, etc, they also built up a large social media team to exploit the favorable landscape they've carved out for themselves.

Given how much flak google, fb and social media has been getting, I don't think they'll want to challenge the washington post anytime soon.

I don't know about auto-close, but I would love to have a quick way to "blacklist" websites such that whenever I saw a link to these sites it was marked and I don't even bother clicking.

if Google made that kind of information (number of times a site was blacklisted) were be available, would sites be incentivized to clean up their act a little?

I doubt it. Big media sites would be blacklisted by many for being "too liberal".

I think there is a similar extension called web of trust.

you can count on some start up measuring this data (from dom tree, or something) to some extend.

This can probably be implemented as an extension right now.

Pihole is your buddy.

Depending on how it is implemented, features like autoclosing can be hijacked for nefarious purposes. Let's say it is done by Chrome "clicking" on the close button, which it detects by the URL and the element id. Once it is in the database, the website could use the element id on an ad or a link to generate spurious ad views or traffic. They could also do it on a small percentage of users to avoid detection.

Slightly offtopic: has anybody noticed that Chrome does not let you block notifications from Google websites like drive, docs etc? It's highly annoying.

I'm so happy since I learnt to master uMatrix...

I recommend it to everybody, especially those who are HTML developers and already know what those checkboxes are about. Change the defaults to something else and only unblock stuff you really trust.