> It's a shame that browsers increasingly have to actively defend against website behavior,

You make this sound like a new trend but it was always thus.

Didn't you live through the 90s before pop-up blockers were built in to browsers? Not to mentionvarious abusive plugins, attempts to trick you into installing toolbars, the hell that was RealPlayer, rewriting your history to prevent 'back', etc etc.

ah phooey just let me have my totally unwarranted nostalgia for imaginary better days gone by

I wish we lived in a place more like the America of yesteryear that only exists in the brains of us Republicans.

- Ned Flanders

You're right, but the arms race has marched on.

HTML5 has increased the amount of work I have to do, I miss the days when Flashblock was all I needed.

(I would love to be wrong about this, please show me an HTML5 blocker with a site-based whitelist.)

Not quite clear on what a "HTML5" blocker is. I'm guessing you don't literally mean "block HTML5"...

Autoplay music was in for a while, went out, then came back in, from what I recall: Back in the 1990s, it was MIDI files on the stereotypical Geocities page, or completely hand-made pages, and that went out in a massive design backlash against those kinds of sites.

Now, it's coming back in the form of autoplay video on news sites, for example, which would have been impossible in the dial-up era.

So this isn't a new thing, it's an old one that's come back. Annoying people have always been annoying.

Yeah, I guess you're right. Seems like back in the day it wasn't nearly as pervasive, you'd know to expect a terrible MIDI track if you hit somebody's MySpace page but generally didn't need to worry about it elsewhere -- but maybe that's rose-colored nostalgia speaking.

(I've never used the phrases "rose-colored nostalgia" and "MySpace" in such close proximity before)

MySpace can a bit later than what msla is referring to.. in fact, the MySpace period (mid 2000s) may have been the best in this regard, as the amateur site makers were increasingly people who didn't know HTML and used more restricted tools like Blogger, but the bandwidth for pervasive video wasn't around yet.

>Annoying people have always been annoying.

But it increases engagement!!!

I'm happy to see these changes coming.

Ad tech is indistinguishable from toddlers who haven't learned the difference between good attention and bad attention.

Is not that they haven't learned, it's that even if you're pissed at an advertisement or whatever other annoying thing they did, at least you're looking at it. And will probably remember it. That's what's important!

I agree that it's possible that annoying ads do work for advertisers. Just like super-expensive Super Bowl ads bring in a good return on investment even if I think I already like Coca-Cola enough to not need to see another commercial. But the ads could be both beneficial for one party (the advertiser, and/or the brand) while being hugely terrible for the host. I'm a news junkie but I actively do not go to CNN.com. Not just I don't visit its front page, but will just ignore any content that's being shared from that domain because I know the ad/video-junk consistently ruins my ability to consume (and enjoy) the content, no matter how great or important it might be.

Hence ad blockers and advertisers crying over browser makers reducing the ability to track users.[0]

[0]http://www.adweek.com/digital/every-major-advertising-group-...

"Engagement" is one of those words, like "value-add", that mean someone is trying to fuck you over.

It was also somewhat popular in the 2000s on Myspace.

It looks like they're also going to add a new permission for audio: https://plus.google.com/photos/photo/100132233764003563318/6...

It's allowed by default, but I imagine you can change that in settings as with all other permissions. That way you could have a whitelist of sites that are allowed to play audio.

It appears that there is already a feature in Chrome for Android which allows this. It will be removed around the same time as this patch to make things more 'consistent'

>Removing the block autoplay setting that is currently available on Chrome for Android

I did not know there was an option for this.

I have now enabled it.

Thanks