Who is "we"? Because the vast majority of users love their animated GIFs. Just look at any social media site. Pop-up windows were easier to banish because people didn't want them. Autoplay, with-sound video too. But animated GIFs are popular.

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.

> Because the vast majority of users love their animated GIFs.

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.

> Nobody is asking for a one-size-fit-all solution

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.

> 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.

> the majority of users want autoplaying GIFs.

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.

> If you ask users if they want gifs or no auto playing video ads they will choose the latter.

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.

I’d be fine with either whitelisting sites or having a button on each gif which starts the animation.

That would be way too complicated for the average user who wants their gifs to play. Given what you want is atypical, isn't it reasonable to expect you to configure it manually? Why should everyone else have to manually enable gifs when that is by far the more common preference?

Is it? Where are you guys getting your stats in this?

Personally I feel like gifs are annoying and distracting.

Come on, be realistic. Tumblr didn't become a billion dollar business just by having good SEO. Lots of people enjoy scrolling through pages of gifs and they won't be satisfied with click-to-play on 100 different 5 second long animations.

Ok, but that's not the point though? The assumption is that The Average User wants these soundless video gif-likes to autoplay. But The Average User never wanted popups. If you don't want them to autoplay, there probably is a setting or extension for it.

If you block animated GIFs, then sites will load a set of images and use DOM APIs to flip through them. Or perhaps they'll write their own video decoder in JS and draw frames to a <canvas>. All of these are much worse for users than letting the site use a proper video codec.

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

You do realise reloading 100 images in JS would be easy for the browser to detect and just disable JS when it finds that happening. I.e. similar to how pop up blocking works. Detect misbehaving, prevent it, ask user to allow it. Same goes for canvas misuse same goes for bandwidth misuse.

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?

> You do realise reloading 100 images in JS would be easy for the browser to detect and just disable JS when it finds that happening.

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%.

So come up with another way, maybe rate limit changing an image's source? Rate limit creating new, visible, image nodes? Just because ad pushers will try to work around something doesn't mean we should just give up. At some point the worsening user experience will negatively impact a site's reputation and people's willingness to view/use it.

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.

> At some point the worsening user experience will negatively impact a site's reputation and people's willingness to view/use it.

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.

Your argument from authority doesn't really add any weight here.

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.

Whitelist Google maps. Man your arguments are weak and defeatist.