You would assume rightly, of course. Unfortunately, Mozilla documentation, which is the best around, is sorely lacking on the details of the HTML5 audio implementation, like proper usage of the load() method, and when it's supposed to be called or not called and when. [1] And I don't really know what Google documentation you're talking about.

So that's the whole point. People who go on about "feature detection" and "follow the spec", and think it's that simple, really don't seem to understand what's actually going on.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLMediaEl...