Here What Happen When You Let the Browser Vendor Decides for You

#1

mentioned here

yeah sure nice side effects
eg. look at all those websites user experience destroyed by Chrome

So in this bug report
Issue 840866 - Allow audio to autoplay, but optionally mute output

we can see other articles talking about that bug

In blocking autoplay videos, Chrome is breaking many Web-based games
WebAudio change means HTML5 games won’t work without developer action.

An update Google rolled out for its popular Chrome browser this weekend helps prevent those annoying auto-playing video ads on many websites from disturbing your day with unwanted sound as well. But that update is causing consternation for many Web-based game developers who are finding that the change completely breaks the audio in their online work.

The technical details behind the problem involve the way Chrome handles WebAudio objects, which are now automatically paused when a webpage starts up, stymying auto-playing ads. To get around this, Web-based games now have to actively restart that pre-loaded audio object when the player makes an action to start the game, even if that audio wasn’t autoplaying beforehand. “The standard doesn’t require you to do this, so no one would have thought to do this before today,” developer Andi McClure told Ars Technica.

…

wait … did they not spent a lot of efforts to kill Flash to avoid such kind of things?
they did (I’m talking about Google alright)

and it seems that is not as simple a problem they thought it would be
eg. How can we block bad/abusive content and at the same time allow good content ?

and this time they can not blame a plugin like Flash for the problem

but it does show a much bigger problem:
Should users let the browser vendor decide for them what content they are allowed to consume ?

The same way I find abusive to force-block the Flash player plugin
I also find abusive to block sound on a web page

and yeah I do hate ads and autoplay video ads in particular

here more details

… This stealth change doesn’t seem to have been heavily promoted by Google, forcing game developers to pay constant and precise attention to Google’s documentation to see it coming.

Most developers didn’t, leading to widespread complaints from Web-based developers big and small that their games are suddenly not working in Chrome. Meanwhile, content on what Google says are “over 1,000 sites where the highest percentage of visitors play media with sound” (such as, ahem, Google’s own YouTube) are being automatically whitelisted to avoid these disruptive changes.

is that not beautiful ?

first advice: change browser
really that is hilarious

second comment even better

and another comment show how it does not affect Google’s content


Voila what happen when the browser want to decide for you of what is allowed or not

I continue to say it’s not that everyone was hating Flash, it was everyone hated ads (and still do)
and my take on all that is that ultimately users should be king in deciding which/what/where content is allowed

that is called the user experience, something Google seems to not care about
and something Flash was very good at.

#2

lol was waiting for you to write about this. i’ve been quietly watching this on twitter.

it’s a fascinating development in so far as having to bottle up the “i told you so” reaction. tbh i don’t see this getting any better. as soon as we removed the ability to chose between tech on the web, and the diversity of different options that we once had, we created this monopoly. only ONE technology, language, and way of doing things is unhealthy. it inevitably leads to this. i think we pretty much handed them the web when we allowed them (even cheered them on) to kill off all other options. it’s predictable, but also ridiculous how this was passed off as progress.

in my opinion it will only get worst. they’ll probably roll back and make some sort of “compromise” (basically same thing as with the Flash Player) but in the long term this is the direction things are going.
it’s why i’m focusing on desktop dev now for my own work, and web is secondary (i’m hopeful but, without competing tech, i don’t see it getting better).
it amazes me how we forgot how good, free, open, and supportive of our work the web once was.

#3

It was hard to resist not commenting on that indeed :slight_smile:

content and content creators are way more important than advertising
people would rather switch medium than get used to a tyrannic environment

I’m not surprised to see people say “we miss Flash”

but yeah it is fascinating to see all that unfolding, and the more scrutiny on private data, and GDPR, etc.
I read somewhere that trust was the new currency

hummm how much trust can we have in such monopoly, when we do know that advertising is at the core of Google business …

I also bet on the desktop more than the web, and the logic so far is pretty simple
more freedom and less compromise gives better user experience

#4

oh and about Google monopoly or google-opoly

see this
This Chart Reveals Google’s True Dominance Over the Web

search-dominance-google.jpg796×1945 447 KB

#5

Yeah Google’s influence and size is really bad. I’ve seen a few articles on this.
The double standards of the discussions surrounding web tech really drive me up the walls.
It’s kind of like if desktop OS’s would start insisting that you can only consume this type of content, under this set of circumstances, and you can only build with these tools (no other languages)… how did we end up being ok with that for the web?
Nobody questions the ethics of this monopolization. I mean, maybe now, on the surface level, it’s questioned a little, but the way I see it is that the web dev community at large helped create this problem. Even when reading some of the responses to this outrage you still have the usual web dev that chimes in about how this is better for progress.
People hated on Flash, and plugins, and used them as a scapegoat without really asking why they are being told to hate a thing and where the information for that hate is coming from, or how true it really is. No amount of truth could counteract any of that. It was just such a cool thing to hate… so now we have this. I mean, what other outcome is there to expect when you give all the power to one technology, one entity, or one group? Especially if they are so deeply invested in advertising.

lol following the bug discussions are great. The comments here, for example: https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/993627449991688193 some people are saying that Google views games as second class citizens. I couldn’t agree more, but this type of experimental work will always be just that. This is why we needed competing technologies on the web. One thing can’t cover all use cases.
It’s interesting how Google chrome dev is asking for examples of work that was broken, when they knew months ahead of time that this would happen. I remember when they announced removing auto play last September people where already up in arms. So they ship this, and it reaches even further… It’s not like this outrage should be a surprise to them.

#6

so they revert it for now
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=840866#c103

Thank you everyone for the examples, they were helpful to our investigation.

We’ve updated Chrome 66 to temporarily remove the autoplay policy for the Web Audio API. This change does not affect most media playback on the web, as the autoplay policy will remain in effect for and .

We’re doing this to give Web Audio API developers (e.g. gaming, audio applications, some RTC features) more time to update their code. The team here is working hard to improve things for users and developers, but in this case we didn’t do a good job of communicating the impact of the new autoplay policy to developers using the Web Audio API.

The policy will be re-applied to the Web Audio API in Chrome 70 (October). Developers should update their code based on the recommendations at: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-policy-changes#webaudio

This report was originally filed with a user interface suggestion for controlling autoplay. As others have pointed out, this is a non-trivial user interface challenge with a lot of nuances. We are still exploring options to enable great audio experiences for users, and we will post more detailed thoughts on that topic here later.

to re-apply it later
and everyone is still not happy

it’s really funny how I can find SWF content made in AS1 (and so very very old) which still gonna work as intended today, while I encounter more and more HTML5 stuff that just breaks a couple of years later because something changed in Web API / Browser / etc.

sometimes I let myself dream of a huge users backslash that would force Google to revert the blocking of Flash

so another comment resonated more with me

Unfortunately, the great majority of existing work will not be updated by October, or ever, and so we still face the effective cultural erasure of those works in October. You guys definitely have the power to break everyone’s work, should you wish to exercise that power, but you do not have the power to make people add workarounds to code that they are not able to alter (for all the various reasons that have been given here). Nobody has that power.

Apply that same logic to SWF, come 2020, not being able to play a SWF because “no plugin allowed”,
will be the biggest cultural erasure of all times, and nobody is rioting at Google’s door to prevent that

#7

yes, i heard of this today too. it’s so predictable. lol tho i thought that they would come up with a nicer compromise but seeing that they only extended the date tells me that they have a clear direction that they want to go and they don’t care about anybody.
when they started doing this to flash i thought that they are behaving like they are the OS of the web and are acting under the premise that they have a right to “drive” tech in a direction that suits them. like they are forcing this facade of progress (“it’s for everyone’s good!”) without seeing how destructive this is.
i hate how so many developers are still supporting this behavior. it’s so bad for our freedom on the web.

on another note… i think that work done in swf is still safer online, in the long term (as crazy as that sounds), than js because the browsers can deteriorate js work faster. just a year or two ago when i told people that google would do stuff like this to html5 work they thought i was crazy, and now here we are lol.
swf is bundled up safely, the only thing keeping anyone from accessing it is the lack of a player which i think can be solved in the long term. even then, the way of reading that swf content will have to stay consistent. browsers can break how we experience js stuff and there is no way of emulating old behavior (“deprecation” is too much of that technology’s and browsers model).
i think there is enough demand and interest for finding a solution to accessing, reading, or emulating swf stuff. i think something will happen in the future… so it’s funny. in the end flash work could still be safer in terms of your work just “living” and being experienced as originally intended.
i know that’s a lot of speculation but there where a couple gamasutra articles about flash preservation, and archive is talking about it too. talk about it is definitely picking up.

yes lol and nobody is rioting YET. they’re already destroying html5 work before completely erasing flash so maybe by that time we’ll all be sick enough of it to get upset one final time. …i hope. if we don’t we’re totally handing the web to them. lol we need competing tech.