I know last year Chrome disallowed auto playing web audio, but they probably found a way around that too. Their scripts ran directly on the host's page (not in iframe), so they could probably trigger playback after any mouse event anywhere on the page.

I think the sites trying to do end-runs are generally low-quality and it will be relatively easy to ignore them. Sites like the Atlantic, The New Yorker, and etc don't do end-runs and so disabling makes my experience sooo much better.

This is just more fuel to add to the pro-ad-blocking argument.

Ad companies are filth.

To be honest, I am wondering more and more if those aggressive unwanted advertisement are having an impact on peoples behavior and emotional baseline. Similar to road rage. Except you dont always sit in your car, but most of us spend significant parts of their lives in front of screens.

If I came across a website that did this I would probably never come back.

They don’t give a toss how you actually feel about the ad. They don’t care that it’s wasting bandwidth, they’ve got ads to show you and nothing should stand in their way as it’s evidently their divine right because they’re gods gift to the internet.

Of course they do, their money depends on having people engage with those ads.

The site that the ad runs on might care about how this affects reader loyalty, but, if they've decided to go with ad networks, they have rather limited editorial control over what ads the networks choose to run on their sites.

So, for those visitors who have adblock, you don't do any more harm by serving annoying ads.

For those who don't have adblock, well, you do do harm, but the cost gets spread over the entire ad industry, which is why adblock usage has grown [0]. On the other hand, the money made from serving the annoying ad and getting the impression comes directly to you (and not the industry).

In short, benefit is immediate to you. Damage is delayed and doesn't come directly to you.

Anyway, I despise this kind of reasoning.

ps. People who worked there seemed quite decent. And that somehow showed in part of their biz practices too. E.g. they intentionally refrained from tracking visitors.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/804008/ad-blocking-reach...

Too many clients (from an agency perspective) are implicitly given good advice "Your potential customer base isn't interested in this" but someone has to ask "How do we get them to see it anyway?"

They have forgotten that potential customers don't have to do business with them. They have options. Time for folks to re-read Seth Godin's "Permission Marketing", it seems.

So everyone ITT saying that “nobody wants automatically playing videos”. Actually yeah, we do, and there are many, and I mean MANY of us.

But I do have a lot of friends that spend time browsing facebook, and not a single one likes autoplaying videos, either wanted or unwanted ones.

Videos do not get into your screen at the same exact time you focus your attention on them. On the occasion that you'll want to watch the video, autoplaying just forces you to see a lot of out of context spoilers and video endings.

There are probably uses that I'm not thinking of (or don't partake in) where this would still be a problem for people.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't think "makes imgur gifs stop playing" is going to attract more users than it drives away. By all means have that as an option, but it'd be a terrible default experience.

Firefox 57 changed to using a more limited extension system like Chrome already had, so it's not like users could jump ship to Chrome to get back Firefox 56's more powerful extensions.

You may not have liked or agreed with that change, but I don't think it actually drove people to alternative browsers. If anything they might have said "Well, I have to going extension browsing anyway to find new ones that work, maybe I'll take a look at the options in Chrome too."

This seems like an assertion in advance of evidence.

To be sure, the entire internet-using public does not get a vote on the issue, aside from browser configurations and plugins (which the people who deny us a vote pay PR agencies to hate). Just like in other instances of disenfranchisement, those who aren't allowed to vote are indeed considered to be "minorities," even if only in the amount of political power they wield.

Basically, what bothers me is that most of software being developed nowadays treats users like shit and the excuse is always along the same lines: "We ensure that we do what users want, by measuring their response, and if they didn't like it they would use something else".

Turns out, you can't go anywhere else if everything is corrupted through same perverse incentives and you don't have the power to change it yourself. Back when most users were more computer-savvy, the users had more power. Obviously, we can't go back to computers being mostly a hobby for geeks, but there has to be some kind of a solution to put more power in users' hands. I just can't think of one.

Yes, this would be what I want.

Edit: Actually, it seemed to be hit-or-miss. Some gifs work, some refuse to play at all.

If that caught on, hopefully it would also be the end of gigantic, unnecessary UI libraries.

Let's disable that too. My browser is not someones corporate programming play room.

Let them. And we'll fight that too. We are all still not closing pop-up windows like the yesteryears of the internet because we refused to accept it.

Personally I don't care for them. I don't care for emojis either but good luck to anyone who wants to take either away from users, particularly in a competitive product like a web browser where users can just switch to an alternative.

Then they can choose to play it. Just like you can opt to allow pop-ups in your browser. Nobody is asking for a one-size-fit-all solution - all they are asking for is choice and control over their browser.

Right, because that isn't possible. Instead you choose sensible defaults that match what users want. Like it or not, the majority of users want autoplaying GIFs.

> all they are asking for is choice and control over their browser.

Which you have. It's a configuration option to disable autoplaying muted video.

Please, what is the name of this one now? And do you know one for disabling autoplaying GIFs too?

EDIT: Oh, it's media.autoplay.enabled, another discussion has it. Thank you for pointing it anyway.

That's an assumption. If you ask users if they want gifs or no auto playing video ads they will choose the latter. And if they don't, so what let them choose.

And that’s a false equivalence. I am able to block annoying ads with an adblocker and simultaneously enjoy my desired auto playing muted videos just fine.

Personally I feel like gifs are annoying and distracting.

So "fighting that too" ultimately means blocking by default either Javascript or all images. Good luck with that in a mainstream browser.

Fighting that too is exactly what we need. Don't be such a push over.

For what it's worth, disabling JS today is actually more reasonable than it was 10 years ago. CSS and HTML actually gets you most of the way there now. (Talking about news style/blog sites, not web apps)

Maybe we should be aiming for that?

Your proposal breaks Google Maps, as well as thousands of other sites, in order to implement an ineffective heuristic that pages can easily bypass by disguising image data as other data.

> For what it's worth, disabling JS today is actually more reasonable than it was 10 years ago. CSS and HTML actually gets you most of the way there now. (Talking about news style/blog sites, not web apps)

> Maybe we should be aiming for that?

Trying to use 10% market share to push the Web to disable JS is a good way to make that market share 0%.

The other assumption here is that the bad actors are actually ad pushers. In fact somewhat reputable news sites like SFGate often push auto playing videos that take a few seconds to stop/close. The likelihood of SFGate, WaPo, or the BBC going to such lengths to display videos seems low — especially since the more aggressive solutions require more bandwidth.

You'd think so, but the same argument is used to claim that blocking isn't needed at all. "Obnoxious ads will negatively impact a site's reputation and people's willingness to view/use it."

Another problem with adding rate limits or other ever-increasingly complicated heuristics is that it makes the Web platform ever more difficult to deploy applications on. You may not see that as a problem, but it pushes app developers to support only native platforms --- where you can't block anything. More unintended consequences.

Web browsers are part of a complex ecosystem where seemingly straightforward actions have all kinds of unintended consequences. Browser developers think about these things all the time and have, in some cases, decades of experience dealing with them, yet they constantly get lambasted by armchair strategists who've thought about these issues for five minutes and decided it's all easy.

We have already mostly solved the problem by playing whackamole for a few years. Ublock mostly have things solved now. Sure some lists are over the top but for the most part it just works.

Maybe you're just jaded and thing it's too "user land" or something but from my perspective the browser should be urging developers toward non shitty user experiences.

Because I know the ad pushers are basically never content with n-1 ads.

Native server side ads would be brilliant by the way. The ad quality drastically shoots up when the buyers have to trust the people pushing their ads.

Its still a nascent thing only found in Blink browsers but at least its something.

I wish there was an option in browsers to prevent the downloading of GIFs (especially on mobile). It used to be useful for artwork, but PNG has taken that over.

If this was common, sites could also serve GIFs with an the content-type of a different image. Since browsers content-sniff between image formats, if the GIF was served as image/png then it wouldn't be until the image finished downloading that the browser would learn it was a GIF.

GIF has a header at the start of the file identifying it as such. It starts with one of two six byte long sequences identifying the version of the format that is being used.

0x47 0x49 0x46 0x38 0x37 0x61 ("GIF87a")

0x47 0x49 0x46 0x38 0x39 0x61 ("GIF89a")

So as long as the file isn't served with additional compression obscuringly applied on top (gzip etc) you will have an indicator that the file might be a GIF after downloading just the six first bytes of it.

Of course you could be unlucky and try to download a file that is not a gif but which happened to start with either of those two sequences of bytes.

But you could:

- Stop downloading it if the URL was loaded via <img>, and place something like an image of the word GIF with a cross over it in the img tag.

- If it was loaded outside of <img>, let the user know that it was blocked as suspected GIF but allow them to override.

At least as a first step toward some kind of anti-GIF thing.

edit: at least it prevents them from being displayed :P

1. The solution as posed works remarkably well. I know this because I use it myself.[1]

2. Extending the pattern to either be case-insensitive or include other animated image formats is pathetically trivial.

________________________________

Notes:

1. Specifically, in my "Annoyances" stylesheet, applied to all sites by default:

    /* gifs: So, it has come to this ... (xkcd) */

    img[src$=".gif"] {
        opacity: 0 !important;
        transition-delay: 3s;
        transition-duration: 1s;
        transition-timing-function: ease;
        transition-property: opacity;
        display: block;
    }

    img[src$=".gif"]:hover {
        transition-delay: 0.3s;
        transition-duration: 0.3s;
        opacity: 1 !important;
    }

The concerns about animated GIFs and javascript obfuscated WEBMs and such only apply to sites that go out of their way to ignore the user's clearly stated preferences.

If fighting that sort of thing mandates an arms war, this is a hill we should be willing to die on. Battle until the bitter end, until the rivers run red with blood.

Note: the plugin could do this on a server, for the additional benefit of smaller bandwidth use.

When I first learned Chrome disabled autoplaying videos, I converted my video, which was around 500 kB, to a GIF, which was now 30 MB, with a noticeable decrease in smoothness and quality. Companies will not stop autoplaying videos, they will merely find other ways around it, because autoplaying videos work for the vast majority of users.

    image.animation_mode    none

https://developer.chrome.com/apps/accessibilityFeatures#prop...

The idea that advertisers are the only thing enabling a free web is bogus and needs to be dispelled, the costs of hosting a small amount of personal content are negligible and prior to the advertising era the occasional dude with cash would just altruistically host random niche websites on a subdomain.

If we are talking about society energy usage it would be ideal to ban ads/adtech entirely.