Indeed. A list of Google's decisions that drive me crazy.
1. Killing Google Reader
2. Removing swipe from Google News feed (both Chrome homepage and News feed in Android that's part of the launcher)
3. Deprecating Google Play Music and switching to Youtube Music (the interface is horrible and intended for videos). I'm a paying user of Google Play Music and this is idiotic.
4. Random recommendations in Youtube, especially more of the same. I have to open one-off videos in a private window so that I don't get recommendations
5. Minor changes in G Suite that make no sense (I'm forgetting what these are at the moment)
6. Showing ads for everything even when I'm just looking for medical information
7. GBoard suddenly asking me to add misspelled words to the dictionary
8. Google Maps interface changes (all the freaking time)
I really wish Google would send all its PMs on a sabbatical for a while so that I can go about using these products in peace without random changes.
Most normal companies are okay with small divisions. Sometimes they'll sell them off. It feels like Google is like Intel. They reflexively kill anything that isn't going to be worth a few hundred million in revenue.
I'm now thinking about the math here. If they put Reader in maintenance mode, even with big-company inefficiency it'd probably only take three full-time engineers to keep it running. That means that they'd need revenue of $4.5M per year to stay competitive with other Google departments.
That's less than $3 per user. Google can't squeeze $3/year in ad revenue out of a product used primarily by wealthy plugged-in tech types?
1. I was annoyed at killing reader too. However, in hindsight before we had Google reader and that was it. Now there is Feedly, Feedbin and multiple self hosted aggregators. And a plethora of RSS clients. RSS did not “die” because of lack of tech around it but because majority prefers twitter and Facebook. Had Reader stayed, would people be lamenting its dominant position?
This is weird. They see the general tech community slowly turning against them and they double down on all the wrong things they were doing that caused the negativity.
I subscribe to this idea too. Unfortunately, I think Google is too large, too influential, and too entrenched for the standard tech adoption life cycle to be the dominant factor.
Unfortunately, that helps exactly zilch. Brave, along with all other Blink/Chromium based browsers and frameworks, further entrenches Chrome as the platform.
Either use Firefox on Android or give up. For desktop, you have at least Firefox, Otter Browser, and Epiphany as options.
I see your point, but I wasn't listing my example as helping or hurting any cause, just how 'techies' can have influence on the broader community. If it helps, you could replace the word Brave with Firefox, for example. If I show three people, and they show three people, etc, we can have big influences on market shares.
Now as a reply to this specific comment, I've tried Firefox multiple times on Android and always hated it. So I obviously can't advocate people use something I hate. But I do wish there were more...options.
I'm a browser junkie. I have about 20 browsers installed in my macOS - some Firefox-based, some Google-based, others weird little ones, and of course Safari.
I really try to support everything that exists, especially non-Chrome.
And yet, I am not excited to download Otter Browser. Its website and SourceForge (i.e. the very fact they're using Sourceforge) do not inspire confidence that they're not modern and up-to-date enough to actually be safe to even use (browser attack surface is massive). Am I wrong in translating this first impression to a judgement on safety?
I agree. But I think the early adoptors mattered back in 2008.I reckon, with the dominance they now have, they are fine with some developers moving to firefox while still having time to react if they pull too many "normal" users with them. Especially since Mozilla isnt exactly peak popularity in terms of vision either.
IE was also absurdly dominant back then. I appreciate the fact that we now live in a world where everything is integrated, so the costs of switching are higher, but it's not impossible
Sure but IE back then was also severely lacking in pretty much every regard and stopped any tangible development. At least every developer I know back then switched away from it primarly because of developer tooling available in other browsers
secondarly because of lack of other features.
With todays major browsers landscape the differences are much more subtle. From a developer productivity perspectice I don't think it matters that much anymore, none is really a 10x or even a 3x browser over the others.
So I don't see a huge developer exodus happing for Chrome as long as they don't completely cripple their web dev experience.
Exactly. Those that care and / or know enough to care are a tiny fraction of the population, in the same vein as those who care enough to use Linux instead of Windows.
Google knows that with their high usage numbers (partly thanks to Android and Firefox's mistakes in the 2000s to mid 2010's, they can do pretty much anything and will still keep their Chrome browser popularity. This is thanks to Android and the general population across the world who don't care enough about their privacy. Plus, if someone uninstalls Chrome where will they go? To Brave (Chromium), Opera(Chromium), Edge(Chromium), Vivaldi(Chromium), or Firefox.
This is actually my worry with the new direction of Firefox on Android which I assume is mostly a push from the Mozilla 'Foundation'/corp.
It feels like they are just force-feeding the 'UX features' of Chrome and ignoring all the feedback from the tech community.
Things like truncating url sub-domains and hiding the url address bar with dynamictoolbar are not necessarily wrong features. However, to me they should always be opt-in, they should never be fixed defaults as what we have now in the latest upgrade of Firefox for Android.
Firefox used to be about freedom and customization. If I want to break it by messing with about:config then I should be able. If I want to break it with a non-compatible add-on then I should be able to. This whole UX mindset of padding the room and "we know better than you what you should want" feels very dismaying especially for a project that exists because of community contributions.
Wow, the above comment was already grayed out in just 5 minutes, simply for stating some facts, as are all the other comments on this page which are critical of Google.
Sometimes it seems HN is heavily astroturfed by Google; They will bury any criticism and somehow bizarrely manage to turn it against other companies!
Any company that does such blatant manipulation just makes people despise them further.
The only tech people that matter much to Google are the ones who work for them, and considering that there will always be one person saying "I work for Google and here's why I think this is A-ok" on every thread like this, suggests that demographic is still in their pocket. See the top comment on this post.
Yeah, which is why I stick with it even though they just butchered a few areas of the UI (most notably the home screen). Fortunately they seem to be listening to reviews and fixing things.
Ah, you're right. No, there isn't an option to do this without explicitly Quitting. I find it a glaring omission myself, along with the fact that deleting Browsing History and Site Data are combined into a single option.
> full autoplay blocking is counter productive as images and <canvas> can do "video" playback just fine. We had this issue on mobile and ended up enabling muted autoplay there to avoid that issues.We found many websites having 100MB gifs that could be one order of magnitude smaller when implemented as <video autoplay muted>.
(Disclaimer: I work on Chrome at Google, but not on media.)
Well... not so much "it doesn't work all the time", but "publishers are reacting to the existence of this option by using grossly inefficient alternatives which we can't block".
Asking on HN for a random chrome engineer using a fresh throwaway (created for this specific post) to look at your 11 hour old low priority performance bug for a specific piece of hardware seems misguided. There are hundreds of engineers working on Chrome -- it is extremely unlikely this person is the right SME for this bug, and even if they were, how could they possibly do anything to your bug internally without revealing their identity?
That may be obvious to you. I had never filled a Chromium bug before and didn't know whether they were going to even have a look at it. Lookin g at the bug link you can see how widespread the damage was because of the recent update. It affected lots of people and its effects were that fps were down to 5 from 60 so yeah, pretty bad. Google doesn't really give a damn in certain areas (i.e. API) where their support is non existent unless you are sone type of VIP. So apologies for coming here with this, I guess I didnt know as much about Chromium bugs process as you do
That's an argument for disabling large GIF autoplay or tying it to the autoplay setting, not for removing the autoplay setting entirely!
Though I guess in the extreme case a webpage could have a huge grid of 1x1px divs that change color in a requestAnimationFrame callback based on data retrieved over XHR.
So I can kinda see their point of view. It still seems a bit too far in the other direction if you ask me though.
... But enough grumbling. I wanted to point out the following documents for more context:
It might not be true in this instance, but I've seen so many times where "the option doesn't fully work and hasn't been working for a while, so let's just remove it entirely" has happened to features in other products.
> full autoplay blocking is counter productive as images and <canvas> can do "video" playback just fine. We had this issue on mobile and ended up enabling muted autoplay there to avoid that issues.We found many websites having 100MB gifs that could be one order of magnitude smaller when implemented as <video autoplay muted>.
The logic kind of makes sense. Autoplay videos already have to be muted so there’s no issue with sound. And if you disable video then idiot ad providers will resort to alternatives that chew up considerably more bandwidth and/or CPU.
I guess they need a setting to disable all canvas tags and GIFs and all autoplay videos.
Doesn't slack look at the size of a gif and skip playing it if it's bigger than 4mb or something?
I'm reminded of Steve Jobs comment on 'toner heads' and why Xerox failed. Google is now run by MBA's and Ad people. So they will continue to do things like this.
It does, but the Slack servers still need to download the image first to know it’s size. There’s no equivalent for a browser. You could rely on Content-Length headers but then ad servers are just going to stop sending them.
This is Google though. It would seem that they could update Googlebot to penalize bypassing behaviors, lowering SERPS for any property that did such shenanigans.
Or giving users in Chrome a Report Button that then filtered into site rankings.
You can download the first frame and then only download 4mb of the rest. If that's not the whole thing then don't download the rest. Or download up to 4mb and if there's more then ignore it and just pull the first frame from the 4mb. Or if the content-length isn't set then assume it's over 4mb and only download the first frame. Granted there's extra complexity in parsing the first frame from a gif in real time.
The rationale here seems to be that by blocking video autoplay, Chrome incentivized sites shipping huge animated GIFs, or decoding video in JS and painting to canvas, both of which are very suboptimal for users.
Unfortunately, full autoplay blocking is counter productive as images and <canvas> can do "video" playback just fine. We had this issue on mobile and ended up enabling muted autoplay there to avoid that issues.We found many websites having 100MB gifs that could be one order of magnitude smaller when implemented as <video autoplay muted>.
endquote
This seems like a case of "the more you squeeze, the more sand trickles through your fingers?". Sites already have a way of always autoplaying muted video, but it involves either shipping 10x the bytes, or spending huge amounts of CPU and battery on decoding in JS.
Might as well let them autoplay muted video and save the user's network/CPU/battery.
Huh, if it were my software I'd add the option of allowing 100MB GIFs or only on demand, and whether the browser should automatically stream blobs for the canvas or not...
Restricting framerate will still download the 100mb GIF.
Also, so many parts of websites use gifs and canvas. If you start blocking those, you'll be hiding loading spinners, menus and more. You're adding ton and ton of complexity and going at war after something pretty silly.
If a website is abusive and does shitty things, just don't use the website. After some point, it's no longer the browsers job to babysit the web. I completely agreed with autoplaying audio, but blocking video is just not worth it.
I'd like the option to abort downloading once a gif reaches the first full frame or 1MB. Whichever comes first. Looks like Chrome will never be that browser.
Seriously gif is only used because it's autoplay predates widespread abuse of autoplay generally. Now is the time to put an end to it, at least as an option.
> If a website is abusive and does shitty things, just don't use the website.
What do you do if the aforementioned is not done by the website as such, but by some omnipresent, and hard to avoid 3rd party ad net?
> After some point, it's no longer the browsers job to babysit the web. I completely agreed with autoplaying audio, but blocking video is just not worth it.
Video is by far the heaviest piece of media out there. There is no practical means to reduce its loading time, especially on mobile. It simply cannot be considered an ordinary piece of page content.
Lastly, people are sick and tired of video ads, and, particularly, obscene, bombastic, and blinking like no tomorrow ones.
With that logic, soon every single feature in the browser will have a pop up saying "Do you want to allow losing <img>?", "Do you want to allow use of "cursor css style?", etc.
> Then maybe the solution is to also have the option turn off animated GIFs
Safari actually does that! At least on Big Sur, if you enable the "Reduce Motion" option in Accessibility Preferences, gifs only animate when you hover the pointer over them.
Feels a bit odd at first (e.g. on animated Discord emojis) but then it seems like an option that should have been there since forever.
> Safari actually does that! At least on Big Sur, if you enable the "Reduce Motion" option in Accessibility Preferences, gifs only animate when you hover the pointer over them.
I'm not on Big Sur yet, so I can't check, but it's a shame if that's the only way to animate it, because I might trust OS-curated animations but not random-website-curated animations. It's a browser preference, not necessarily an OS-wide preference. (But I do think that inheriting it is sensible!)
As with all things customiseable, Firefox has had this option for a long time. (But look for their Chrome-chasing to lead them to get rid of this option soon ….)
And what sites are replacing videos with massive gifs? Buzzfeed-like sites have always been filling their pages with 250 megabytes of gifs. News sites with half a dozen autoplaying videos certainly won't be replacing their videos with multi-gigabyte gif versions. And it seems like detecting a large, constantly repainted canvas would be easy enough.
I remember implementing some web proxy monitoring a while ago, and I had a whole list of sites I had to ignore because of stuff like this. HN homepage would take a handful of milliseconds to load, but some sites would routinely take 10-20 second to get to the window load. Somebody asked “but what if a user complains that cnn.com is loading too slowly?”, and we all agreed we’d just have to tell them to get in touch with CNN.
Search engines dont earn money from ads on other sites though. The problem is that all alternative engines are based on google and bing, and that wont change soon, so there's no flexibility.
That's how autoplay videos were originally implemented on mobile browsers. Implementations included GIFs, or giant JPGs of stitched video frames switched out with JS. Some even used video decoders that were transpiled to JS and there are webassembly versions now too.
It was all replaced when browsers finally implemented video tags that played in screen, but the tech still exists.
I agree with you in principle but is more nuanced than that, lets say an user taps a link they think goes to a gif, according to you there should be a play button over the gif? You would be killing a lot of traffic for that site because that annoys users, or imagine a site with infinite scroll (ala twitter) with funny gifs, should the user have to click each single gif they want to watch? Plus keep in mind the users would save a lot of (maybe costly) bandwidth and battery if they used muted videos instead of GIFS so why use them?
This is not an excuse - the user should have the freedom to disable whatever they want - who is to say that your definition of a broken internet matches mine?
If I, the user, disable some functionality and the site doesn't work I can:
A: add the site to an allow list
B: temporarily enable the feature for that site
C: stop using the site
Most of the time I'll give a site the benefit of the doubt, only when they pull shady tricks like dark patterns and whatnot do I just stop using the site.
Reddit is a great current example. I will not use their site or their app because they're both awful, and reddit is trying to force the app down my throat. If the app I use gets shut down by API changes I'll just stop using reddit.
Not sure how it would break the internet at all, can you say that you have ever had a user experience improved by auto playing anything?
I mean, heaven for bid, they could the user the ability to actually control the repaint rate. Or pull only the first frame of a gif, and not pull the 100+ meg gif without user consent(via touch, by site, etc..) Browsers wouldn't block popups for years because it could break legitimate use, now I don't think a single browser doesn't ship with that option not on by default.
I think the reality is, that these are features and functions that advertisers want, and google is in the business of selling ads.
Agree -- I mean even Buzzfeed of all sites usually doesn't auto-play their gifs[0]; you get a static image with a play button that swaps to the gif when you click it.
[0] Just realized while typing this that I haven't clicked a Buzzfeed link in a long time, so my memory might be off. But I know some site I used to visit frequently did this.
> You can't turn off gifs or canvas because it would just break too much internet.
That sounds like a challenge.
I think if there were a click to play button on gifs > N megabytes or > X*Y resolution, nobody would complain, nor would they complain about click to play on frequently updated canvases.
It's a very convenient phrasing, because these "individuals" certainly are doing what they say; it's just that they are not you. I trust Mozilla only slightly more than Google.
Turning off canvas only breaks tracking. Very few sites require it to work. Firefox will ask you to enable it on a per-site bases by enabling privacy.resistFingerprinting.
Isn't the size in the header? (Which yea, could be faked, or sent as Chunked) the USER-agent could just make a cap, and stop after 1mb when image/gif media type
HTTP allows the body length to be specified in the header before the body is downloaded via the `Content-Length` header. It also allows you to stream the body in chunks by setting the `Transfer-Encoding` header to `chunked`, as you've mentioned, in which case each chunk starts with its own length. In both cases, the length cannot be faked because the recipient will stop pulling bytes after the specified length, as that's the purpose of sending such length (after there's no more bytes according to the latest length, the connection is free to be used for a subsequent response)!
You can just block all <canvas> tags with a `##canvas` rule for uBlock Origin. It of course breaks some real sites, but not on anything I use regularly. A canvas repaint rate limit could be nice, though I have been surprised at how little I notice all canvas tags just being blocked.
Gifs are trickier. I'll often see non-animated images in gif format. Because of extension API limitations, uBO can't block gifs based on file size or animation frame count. (file size isn't even known until the start of the fetch)
Though Firefox at least does lets you disable all gif animations without just blocking all gifs.
Gifs are trickier. I'll often see non-animated images in gif format. uBO doesn't have the power to block images based on file size. (The file size isn't even known until the start of the fetch)
Browsers' native functionality (if not deliberately crippled) and filtering proxies can definitely block animated GIFs while leaving static ones alone, by simply terminating the connection after the first frame.
You can turn off GIF animation in Chrome, you are still downloading the giantass GIF. Slowing down canvas repaints if one of your overall goals is web applications that have feature and performance parity with desktop ones is, I think, unlikely. I'm a bit more surprised Google (and all browser vendors) aren't more proactive in just killing off animated GIFs.
Except animated GIFs are the only way to have embedded "video" in Google Slides.
(Yes, you can technically "embed" YouTube videos, but they play in the YouTube player with all of its chrome and only in widescreen with letterboxing if your aspect ratio doesn't fit)
Both are made by Google so this feels like one of the easier things Google can fix. Twitter and FB are essentially aGIF-less and they don't even make popular browsers!
Which touches on something that drives me insane. Browsers are reinventing the OS and they are leaving out all the tools useful for managing one's computer. I should be able to identify which tab is using tons of CPU. Which tabs are using lots of RAM. I should be able to stop a particular bit of script (aka process.) WTF do I get a pop up telling me a script may be causing a page to be slow, but nothing identifying which of the five to six tabs in my eight to ten browser windows it is?
Another thing that would be nice is if I had a setting in the browser that allowed me to specify how many ms/sec a script is allowed to run. It would be pleasant to be able to limit scripts to 1 ms per second of run time.
That's what happens when you let anybody and their friends run arbitrary code on the user's CPU. Javascript running by default was the original sin, and now there's no going back. IMO it ought to have been opt-in for the websites that really need it (i.e. web apps I actually want to use, not any random page I happen to stumble upon).
There's especially no going back for Google for whom it's very much a feature since they try to reimplement and replace the OS from within the browser.
Animated gifs are obviously trivial to block, so it doesn't seem worth even addressing that. The other half of the GP talks about rendering directly to canvas, using JavaScript...
The gif excuse doesn’t make sense. If Google was really concerned about that they would also provided a way to block huge gif, in addition to auto-play video.
Man, who came with that idea? I really want to know the name of that product manager.
It takes only one of those 4k video ads to kill my data package within seconds, with me not even having an idea of that happening.
With amount of stuff you threw at adblock before, I can not keep assuming goodwill from your side. Your explanation about "giant gifs" is so disingenuous.
> It takes only one of those 4k video ads to kill my data package within seconds, with me not even having an idea of that happening.
Right, but the point is that disabling autoplay video doesn’t stop that from happening. An ad network would use a canvas tag or a GIF instead. That’a not disingenuous reasoning, it’s exactly what they do!
In your situation you need some kind of browser setting to limit download size, because that’s your problem. Not the method by which that huge amount of data is being presented on screen.
> Right, but the point is that disabling autoplay video doesn’t stop that from happening. An ad network would use a canvas tag or a GIF instead. That’a not disingenuous reasoning, it’s exactly what they do!
Then deal with the canvas tag or GIF, like Firefox already has the capability to. Don't suddenly decide it isn't worth the effort.
Publishers found gaping holes in their blocking and response is to give up.
Firefox already has config options to disable image animations and canvas. I've had them on for ages and sites work fine.
Maybe they can re-enable popup windows too since sites replaced them with interstitials long ago.
Chrome's dominance needs to end, this is blatantly anti user. Google could have de-ranked sites with hostile behavior a decade ago and we wouldn't be dealing with any of this stuff. But they won't, because ad money.
> Google could have de-ranked sites with hostile behavior a decade ago and we wouldn't be dealing with any of this stuff.
They already block what they consider to be 'bad' ads on websites. This is just them giving up because there's no strategic value in making a user-focused browser.
I dread updates from google for there apps they break and change stuff that majorly upsets my workflow all the time. The worst I can remember was the no longer unlock screen with google assistant updates like a few years ago. I was at the hospitable in the morning after that update and many sad handless people could not use their life lines because of a fucking update.
This doesn't pass the smell test, at all. This is the equivalent of saying "Oh no, spammers have discovered we're blocking emails with 'Viagra' in them so now they're spelling it 'V1agra', might as well give up and not try to block that penis enlargement spam."
The user intent is clearly to not show large animations on the page without user consent. Seems just as easy to block large animated gifs, or canvas updates, with the same browser setting.
I don't want to pile on the Chrome team for what is ultimately an at least somewhat sensible decision in the moment. And I 100% appreciate the context you're providing. But this is such a frustrating comment to read!
The GIF/Canvas problem is something critics brought up when Chrome first introduced its automatic autoplay blocking. Chrome's autoplay blocking didn't go far enough to block all media types, and it had fundamental design flaws that made it easy to circumvent and easy for websites to detect when a video is blocked. Blocking autoplay was never about saving data -- there were always going to be these kinds of circumvention techniques. Data-saving solutions require different strategies.
But because ultimately Chrome just wanted to do its own thing and get those positive press releases, and because the Chrome devs were trying to fix multiple unrelated problems at the same time, we got a really weird Frankenstein implementation instead of something sensible like auto-muting browser tabs on new domains by default. This is a result that could have been avoided by engaging more with the web community and spending more time up-front thinking about how the feature was going to be used in the wild. Instead it got rushed out because the Chrome dev team digs in its heels and gets combative whenever developers question their decisions.
This result is especially frustrating with autoplay, because digging in heels and rushing the implementation didn't just leave us with a useless feature -- it broke functionality on a ton of websites, including Google's own search page. We got a hacky solution that was rolled out too early and that broke the web because Google insisted they needed an behaviorally-driven, complicated system with a bunch of weird rules and exceptions about when things would and wouldn't be able to play.
And now all of the minor benefits from that system are getting removed and all of the justifications for breaking existing sites are apparently being rolled back -- but we're still left with a hacky solution that breaks websites. We got the worst of all possible worlds because the Chrome team is apparently just unable to engage with developer communities.
As a web dev, I am low-key bitter about how this all played out. This is exactly why it's a bad idea to give the Chrome team so much outsized control over web standards. They broke almost every indie web game online, forced multiple engines to release updates, and this is what we're left with? Because nobody on the Chrome team was capable of predicting that advertisers were going to start shipping GIFs?
Frankly, for me, the autoplay issue was the straw that broke the camel's back. With Firefox, I keep autoplay disabled and only enable it on some sites. Otherwise the browser becomes unusable, especially on some news websites. Therefore your explanations make little sense to me because this option works in Firefox perfectly - at least for me.
What is funny is that when you search for "Chrome disable autoplay" one of the top results is the extension
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-auto... - which adds srvtrck.com (blocked by uBlock origin) for each request. This is not the web browsing experience I want to live with.
As an insider, do you think Google in 2020 would attempt to try to use its near-monopoly on search to force users to use other Google products they don't want and can't opt out of?
(From the outside this is what it seems like to me, so curious what the feeling is like on the inside.) Thanks for your honesty.
Yeah but the sites that allow that garbage are 99% garbage. I want to block autoplay and can think of very very few things that slipped through. Particularly on news sites. I won't visit sites that allow stuff like that, and I'd bet that most people don't either. You shoudl optimize for those parts of your application that are most important and used most often. Amdahl's law
This thread is a microcosm of the problems with the world at large atm. 70% of the response are people frothing at the mouth outrages over those evil "other people" when the other people had nothing but good intentions. Then absolutely refusing to see those good intentions and painting everything as poorly as possible.
Why? The engineers in the bug tracker seem to be making this change specifically to improve user experience. Trying to plug the hole by blocking gifs, canvas, and whatever people would think of next seems worse than just letting them do the right thing.
Google is a huge company with very little of what could be considered a unified vision. It doesn’t make that much sense to talk about Google as a single unit but as many teams with vague corporate influences.
I think it’s reasonable to be a little conservative when any decision you make has to work for billions of installs and every unknown website.
So true. Add in the old-school absolutists that believe that everything more complicated than links should be banned and that people should play videos by interpreting the raw octet stream, and it makes up pretty much everyone in this thread.
A lot of comments here trying to explain this away but let me point out that Apple disabled autoplaying unmuted videos in moble Safari years ago (it's not even behind a setting as far as I know) and I can't imagine them backing off of that any time soon.
On the contrary, Apple will savage decades old APIs just to marginally improve privacy [0]. Which is what Google would do if users were the customer.
Apple is problematic in many ways, but I'm glad there's at least one mega-corporation that's really staked out privacy and user experience as a selling point for paying customers.
This. I’ve just gotten my pine phone and am going through all the trouble of recompiling basic software just to have a working phone that isn’t a “smartphone” and even I appreciated what apple did with mobile safari.
You might be surprised how few users agree with you on this point - or rather, care enough to engage in the conversation at all. Blocking non-muted video is something most people are happy about. Blocking mute animations, I don't think many people are gonna waste much energy caring about it.
Apple was also the one who invented this terrible “individual video frames on a canvas” technique for their next device launch homepage, six months later.
It was literally to work around their own restriction:
tangentially related: what's everyone's solution for blocking autoplaying sticky videos? By that I mean the kind that usually shows up on news sites or tech blogs. It usually manifests as a "recommended" video that's totally unrelated to the article at hand, and stars playing without you clicking the play button. If you scroll past the video, many of them convert to a sticky mini player that stays around wherever you scroll.
I've tried changing the autoplay setting from "block audio" to "block audio and video", but that breaks sites, especially the ones that assume you have autoplay enabled and don't have controls available. It's also hard to know when something's broken. I see a static image and I'm left to wonder whether it's a video that's hasn't started yet or it's actually a picture. For some sites, blocking autoplay don't even prevent the videos from loading because they start video playback during an onScroll event, which makes the browser think the playback was user-initiated.
My solution is to remember what site it is and never ever visit them again because that’s totally unacceptable.
If for some reason you absolutely have to spend time on a broken site like that it’s pretty easy to delete the video (or dickbar or ad or whatever) with the web inspector.
In general links to anything other than eg lkml or lwn make me pretty uncomfortable tbf.
Umatrix seems to do such a good job at messing with these sites dependencies that I usually don't see sticky videos at all. It allows you to block/allow individual classes of resources for each domain.
It will require some fiddling on first visit through.
Use UBlockOrigin, and every time you see one of those sticky thumb players, create a regex rule to remove it. I must have hundreds of those little rules in place on my browsers. I never searched how to send my list to one of the maintainers of the most popular ad/annoyance lists but I think now it's time.
> what's everyone's solution for blocking autoplaying sticky videos?
Compile your browser without support for video codecs.
99% of the time I don't care if no videos play back in my browser.
0.9% of the time the video is on youtube, so I can youtube-dl it to watch with mpv, which kicks the crap out of every in-browser video playback UI ever created.
The remaining 0.1% of the time I fire up a separate browser that does have video codecs.
Web video is simply unnecessary. Try life without it, you won't mind.
I choose not to visit those sites, they're on my (mental) block list. Typically if a link goes to a US news site, or a newspaper I won't follow it. As a result I get most general interest news from https://bbc.co.uk/news
In addition to numerous suggestions: identifying and DNS-blocking the video distribution networks utilised by such sites is persuasively effective. PiHole, DNSBL, IP firewall, uMatrix, ir any similar mechanism.
DNS-over-HTTPS adds a few kinks to this but does not prevent the inherent concept.
Why not allow users to specify that they do not want any site with autoplay videos (in any shape) to show up in their top results? Alternatively - when Google shows a search result, indicate if the website has autoplay videos, this way I can avoid clicking it.
Firefox did well enough until chrome came along. It even managed to keep up until the recent downsizing. In other words your comment only makes sense if you just woke up from a thirty year long coma.
It did well enough until there was real competition? Firefox is only alive from fat Google Search checks. It’s a great example of a massive failure in this charity business model.
Given that Microsoft almost killed the entire browser industry just by releasing IE it is quite a success to be around decades later.
> It did well enough until there was real competition
"Real" competition doesn't have to artificially cripple high profile sites to compete. The chrome style of competition gave us ShadowDom v0 on youtube, disappearing features in maps and gmail, empty html elements that only seemed to be there to prevent Edge from accelerating video playback and constant popups reminding users to "upgrade" to Chrome.
The solution I've found is just to disable javascript altogether, then manually whitelist a small number of sites that don't work without js. Sure, a lot of the web stops working for me, but it's also probably the part of the web I don't want to see anymore anyway.
Just disabling 3rd party JS solves a lot of the problems. Still have to whitelist a lot, but it is easier than blocking which just feels like whack-a-mole.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] thread1. Killing Google Reader 2. Removing swipe from Google News feed (both Chrome homepage and News feed in Android that's part of the launcher) 3. Deprecating Google Play Music and switching to Youtube Music (the interface is horrible and intended for videos). I'm a paying user of Google Play Music and this is idiotic. 4. Random recommendations in Youtube, especially more of the same. I have to open one-off videos in a private window so that I don't get recommendations 5. Minor changes in G Suite that make no sense (I'm forgetting what these are at the moment) 6. Showing ads for everything even when I'm just looking for medical information 7. GBoard suddenly asking me to add misspelled words to the dictionary 8. Google Maps interface changes (all the freaking time)
I really wish Google would send all its PMs on a sabbatical for a while so that I can go about using these products in peace without random changes.
They just happen to be the 2 million most vocal people in tech circles...
It wasn't sustainable
That's less than $3 per user. Google can't squeeze $3/year in ad revenue out of a product used primarily by wealthy plugged-in tech types?
1. I was annoyed at killing reader too. However, in hindsight before we had Google reader and that was it. Now there is Feedly, Feedbin and multiple self hosted aggregators. And a plethora of RSS clients. RSS did not “die” because of lack of tech around it but because majority prefers twitter and Facebook. Had Reader stayed, would people be lamenting its dominant position?
I have cookies disabled however, with that, it means I then get the popup every single time I play the video.
Google needs to improve its ability to lead. Which is not the same thing as being wedded to an idea and insular.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle
Either use Firefox on Android or give up. For desktop, you have at least Firefox, Otter Browser, and Epiphany as options.
Now as a reply to this specific comment, I've tried Firefox multiple times on Android and always hated it. So I obviously can't advocate people use something I hate. But I do wish there were more...options.
I really try to support everything that exists, especially non-Chrome.
And yet, I am not excited to download Otter Browser. Its website and SourceForge (i.e. the very fact they're using Sourceforge) do not inspire confidence that they're not modern and up-to-date enough to actually be safe to even use (browser attack surface is massive). Am I wrong in translating this first impression to a judgement on safety?
With todays major browsers landscape the differences are much more subtle. From a developer productivity perspectice I don't think it matters that much anymore, none is really a 10x or even a 3x browser over the others.
So I don't see a huge developer exodus happing for Chrome as long as they don't completely cripple their web dev experience.
Google knows that with their high usage numbers (partly thanks to Android and Firefox's mistakes in the 2000s to mid 2010's, they can do pretty much anything and will still keep their Chrome browser popularity. This is thanks to Android and the general population across the world who don't care enough about their privacy. Plus, if someone uninstalls Chrome where will they go? To Brave (Chromium), Opera(Chromium), Edge(Chromium), Vivaldi(Chromium), or Firefox.
It feels like they are just force-feeding the 'UX features' of Chrome and ignoring all the feedback from the tech community.
Things like truncating url sub-domains and hiding the url address bar with dynamictoolbar are not necessarily wrong features. However, to me they should always be opt-in, they should never be fixed defaults as what we have now in the latest upgrade of Firefox for Android.
Firefox used to be about freedom and customization. If I want to break it by messing with about:config then I should be able. If I want to break it with a non-compatible add-on then I should be able to. This whole UX mindset of padding the room and "we know better than you what you should want" feels very dismaying especially for a project that exists because of community contributions.
- Allow All Auto-Play
- Stop Media with Sound
- Never Auto-Play
This can be configured on a global level, or on a site-by-site basis.
Sometimes it seems HN is heavily astroturfed by Google; They will bury any criticism and somehow bizarrely manage to turn it against other companies!
Any company that does such blatant manipulation just makes people despise them further.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Checkout kiwi: https://github.com/kiwibrowser/src
Though, no idea about extensive security.
According to https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=106364..., it was removed because it didn't actually stop sites from autoplaying video:
> full autoplay blocking is counter productive as images and <canvas> can do "video" playback just fine. We had this issue on mobile and ended up enabling muted autoplay there to avoid that issues.We found many websites having 100MB gifs that could be one order of magnitude smaller when implemented as <video autoplay muted>.
(Disclaimer: I work on Chrome at Google, but not on media.)
[1]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list?q=media%20s...
...and it turns out I was right! "It doesn't work all the time, let's remove it." Frankly, I really really hate that attitude.
At least the option would have some effect, now it has none. That is clearly a worse situation than before.
Fuck this idiotic slow boiling of the users.
Asking on HN for a random chrome engineer using a fresh throwaway (created for this specific post) to look at your 11 hour old low priority performance bug for a specific piece of hardware seems misguided. There are hundreds of engineers working on Chrome -- it is extremely unlikely this person is the right SME for this bug, and even if they were, how could they possibly do anything to your bug internally without revealing their identity?
Though I guess in the extreme case a webpage could have a huge grid of 1x1px divs that change color in a requestAnimationFrame callback based on data retrieved over XHR.
So I can kinda see their point of view. It still seems a bit too far in the other direction if you ask me though.
... But enough grumbling. I wanted to point out the following documents for more context:
https://blog.chromium.org/2017/09/unified-autoplay.html (Somewhat wordsmithed...)
https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/audio-video/auto...
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EH7qZatVnTXsBGvQc_53R97Z...
But then again, it was reported 9 months ago. It should have been fixed by now.
It might not be true in this instance, but I've seen so many times where "the option doesn't fully work and hasn't been working for a while, so let's just remove it entirely" has happened to features in other products.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=106364...
> full autoplay blocking is counter productive as images and <canvas> can do "video" playback just fine. We had this issue on mobile and ended up enabling muted autoplay there to avoid that issues.We found many websites having 100MB gifs that could be one order of magnitude smaller when implemented as <video autoplay muted>.
The logic kind of makes sense. Autoplay videos already have to be muted so there’s no issue with sound. And if you disable video then idiot ad providers will resort to alternatives that chew up considerably more bandwidth and/or CPU.
I guess they need a setting to disable all canvas tags and GIFs and all autoplay videos.
I'm reminded of Steve Jobs comment on 'toner heads' and why Xerox failed. Google is now run by MBA's and Ad people. So they will continue to do things like this.
Or giving users in Chrome a Report Button that then filtered into site rankings.
https://kiwibrowser.com
https://github.com/kiwibrowser/src
PS: Oops, another guy posted the link earler.
The rationale here seems to be that by blocking video autoplay, Chrome incentivized sites shipping huge animated GIFs, or decoding video in JS and painting to canvas, both of which are very suboptimal for users.
Another comment points to this issue: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=106364...
quote:
Unfortunately, full autoplay blocking is counter productive as images and <canvas> can do "video" playback just fine. We had this issue on mobile and ended up enabling muted autoplay there to avoid that issues.We found many websites having 100MB gifs that could be one order of magnitude smaller when implemented as <video autoplay muted>.
endquote
This seems like a case of "the more you squeeze, the more sand trickles through your fingers?". Sites already have a way of always autoplaying muted video, but it involves either shipping 10x the bytes, or spending huge amounts of CPU and battery on decoding in JS.
Might as well let them autoplay muted video and save the user's network/CPU/battery.
In any case, just leaving the option alone so at least it has some effect like it did before, would still be better than essentially a full surrender.
Also, so many parts of websites use gifs and canvas. If you start blocking those, you'll be hiding loading spinners, menus and more. You're adding ton and ton of complexity and going at war after something pretty silly.
If a website is abusive and does shitty things, just don't use the website. After some point, it's no longer the browsers job to babysit the web. I completely agreed with autoplaying audio, but blocking video is just not worth it.
Seriously gif is only used because it's autoplay predates widespread abuse of autoplay generally. Now is the time to put an end to it, at least as an option.
What do you do if the aforementioned is not done by the website as such, but by some omnipresent, and hard to avoid 3rd party ad net?
> After some point, it's no longer the browsers job to babysit the web. I completely agreed with autoplaying audio, but blocking video is just not worth it.
Video is by far the heaviest piece of media out there. There is no practical means to reduce its loading time, especially on mobile. It simply cannot be considered an ordinary piece of page content.
Lastly, people are sick and tired of video ads, and, particularly, obscene, bombastic, and blinking like no tomorrow ones.
Use an ad blocker. Since mobile chrome doesn't allow adblocking, this means you will have to choose one of the many other mobile browsers that do.
SVG has autoplaying animation possibilities.
SVG has JavaScript if you are putting it directly into the body of the page.
You can also put anything into SVG with the foreign object element, so also videos.
So yes if someone stopped me abusing the users with my autoplaying videos I might decide to abuse them with SVG before these other options.
Safari actually does that! At least on Big Sur, if you enable the "Reduce Motion" option in Accessibility Preferences, gifs only animate when you hover the pointer over them.
Feels a bit odd at first (e.g. on animated Discord emojis) but then it seems like an option that should have been there since forever.
I'm not on Big Sur yet, so I can't check, but it's a shame if that's the only way to animate it, because I might trust OS-curated animations but not random-website-curated animations. It's a browser preference, not necessarily an OS-wide preference. (But I do think that inheriting it is sensible!)
As with all things customiseable, Firefox has had this option for a long time. (But look for their Chrome-chasing to lead them to get rid of this option soon ….)
And what sites are replacing videos with massive gifs? Buzzfeed-like sites have always been filling their pages with 250 megabytes of gifs. News sites with half a dozen autoplaying videos certainly won't be replacing their videos with multi-gigabyte gif versions. And it seems like detecting a large, constantly repainted canvas would be easy enough.
It was all replaced when browsers finally implemented video tags that played in screen, but the tech still exists.
Now I'm looking for a gif and canvas blocker for FF mobile. Any hints on how to tune uBO?
I could imagine and equal reaction thread here if google deemed some gifs and canvas uses "unworthy" and were blockable.
If I, the user, disable some functionality and the site doesn't work I can:
A: add the site to an allow list B: temporarily enable the feature for that site C: stop using the site
Most of the time I'll give a site the benefit of the doubt, only when they pull shady tricks like dark patterns and whatnot do I just stop using the site.
Reddit is a great current example. I will not use their site or their app because they're both awful, and reddit is trying to force the app down my throat. If the app I use gets shut down by API changes I'll just stop using reddit.
I mean, heaven for bid, they could the user the ability to actually control the repaint rate. Or pull only the first frame of a gif, and not pull the 100+ meg gif without user consent(via touch, by site, etc..) Browsers wouldn't block popups for years because it could break legitimate use, now I don't think a single browser doesn't ship with that option not on by default.
I think the reality is, that these are features and functions that advertisers want, and google is in the business of selling ads.
This isn't a can't, its a won't.
[0] Just realized while typing this that I haven't clicked a Buzzfeed link in a long time, so my memory might be off. But I know some site I used to visit frequently did this.
That sounds like a challenge.
I think if there were a click to play button on gifs > N megabytes or > X*Y resolution, nobody would complain, nor would they complain about click to play on frequently updated canvases.
Individuals must have the ability to shape the internet and their own experiences on it.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040344
It's a very convenient phrasing, because these "individuals" certainly are doing what they say; it's just that they are not you. I trust Mozilla only slightly more than Google.
Gifs are trickier. I'll often see non-animated images in gif format. Because of extension API limitations, uBO can't block gifs based on file size or animation frame count. (file size isn't even known until the start of the fetch)
Though Firefox at least does lets you disable all gif animations without just blocking all gifs.
Browsers' native functionality (if not deliberately crippled) and filtering proxies can definitely block animated GIFs while leaving static ones alone, by simply terminating the connection after the first frame.
(Yes, you can technically "embed" YouTube videos, but they play in the YouTube player with all of its chrome and only in widescreen with letterboxing if your aspect ratio doesn't fit)
Here's a hammer Google has used before to make other websites tow their line: Peanlize their search rankings.
Which touches on something that drives me insane. Browsers are reinventing the OS and they are leaving out all the tools useful for managing one's computer. I should be able to identify which tab is using tons of CPU. Which tabs are using lots of RAM. I should be able to stop a particular bit of script (aka process.) WTF do I get a pop up telling me a script may be causing a page to be slow, but nothing identifying which of the five to six tabs in my eight to ten browser windows it is?
Another thing that would be nice is if I had a setting in the browser that allowed me to specify how many ms/sec a script is allowed to run. It would be pleasant to be able to limit scripts to 1 ms per second of run time.
There's especially no going back for Google for whom it's very much a feature since they try to reimplement and replace the OS from within the browser.
The _only_ way to block autoplaying video is to block all animation, which means all of:
- animated GIFs
- nearly all JavaScript
- CSS animation
- partial rendering (showing the top part of a page before the entire page is done downloading)
Everyone else calling for just blocking animated GIFs and canvas is just going to be hit by even more CPU and bandwidth intensive workarounds.
The other problem, though, is that that makes adblockers a bigger performance win.
It takes only one of those 4k video ads to kill my data package within seconds, with me not even having an idea of that happening.
With amount of stuff you threw at adblock before, I can not keep assuming goodwill from your side. Your explanation about "giant gifs" is so disingenuous.
Right, but the point is that disabling autoplay video doesn’t stop that from happening. An ad network would use a canvas tag or a GIF instead. That’a not disingenuous reasoning, it’s exactly what they do!
In your situation you need some kind of browser setting to limit download size, because that’s your problem. Not the method by which that huge amount of data is being presented on screen.
Then deal with the canvas tag or GIF, like Firefox already has the capability to. Don't suddenly decide it isn't worth the effort.
Intentionally releasing a virus to sell the cure their cure.
Firefox already has config options to disable image animations and canvas. I've had them on for ages and sites work fine.
Maybe they can re-enable popup windows too since sites replaced them with interstitials long ago.
Chrome's dominance needs to end, this is blatantly anti user. Google could have de-ranked sites with hostile behavior a decade ago and we wouldn't be dealing with any of this stuff. But they won't, because ad money.
They already block what they consider to be 'bad' ads on websites. This is just them giving up because there's no strategic value in making a user-focused browser.
chrome://settings/content/ads
The user intent is clearly to not show large animations on the page without user consent. Seems just as easy to block large animated gifs, or canvas updates, with the same browser setting.
1. Ads
2. Make the mobike web worse to shove AMP down our throats
The GIF/Canvas problem is something critics brought up when Chrome first introduced its automatic autoplay blocking. Chrome's autoplay blocking didn't go far enough to block all media types, and it had fundamental design flaws that made it easy to circumvent and easy for websites to detect when a video is blocked. Blocking autoplay was never about saving data -- there were always going to be these kinds of circumvention techniques. Data-saving solutions require different strategies.
But because ultimately Chrome just wanted to do its own thing and get those positive press releases, and because the Chrome devs were trying to fix multiple unrelated problems at the same time, we got a really weird Frankenstein implementation instead of something sensible like auto-muting browser tabs on new domains by default. This is a result that could have been avoided by engaging more with the web community and spending more time up-front thinking about how the feature was going to be used in the wild. Instead it got rushed out because the Chrome dev team digs in its heels and gets combative whenever developers question their decisions.
This result is especially frustrating with autoplay, because digging in heels and rushing the implementation didn't just leave us with a useless feature -- it broke functionality on a ton of websites, including Google's own search page. We got a hacky solution that was rolled out too early and that broke the web because Google insisted they needed an behaviorally-driven, complicated system with a bunch of weird rules and exceptions about when things would and wouldn't be able to play.
And now all of the minor benefits from that system are getting removed and all of the justifications for breaking existing sites are apparently being rolled back -- but we're still left with a hacky solution that breaks websites. We got the worst of all possible worlds because the Chrome team is apparently just unable to engage with developer communities.
As a web dev, I am low-key bitter about how this all played out. This is exactly why it's a bad idea to give the Chrome team so much outsized control over web standards. They broke almost every indie web game online, forced multiple engines to release updates, and this is what we're left with? Because nobody on the Chrome team was capable of predicting that advertisers were going to start shipping GIFs?
What is funny is that when you search for "Chrome disable autoplay" one of the top results is the extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-auto... - which adds srvtrck.com (blocked by uBlock origin) for each request. This is not the web browsing experience I want to live with.
As an insider, do you think Google in 2020 would attempt to try to use its near-monopoly on search to force users to use other Google products they don't want and can't opt out of?
(From the outside this is what it seems like to me, so curious what the feeling is like on the inside.) Thanks for your honesty.
I haven't looked into it, who knows I might have flipped the switch.
But previously they would or would not autoplay on both as far as I can recall
(I know, sarcasm is lowest form of humor)
Google is a huge company with very little of what could be considered a unified vision. It doesn’t make that much sense to talk about Google as a single unit but as many teams with vague corporate influences.
I think it’s reasonable to be a little conservative when any decision you make has to work for billions of installs and every unknown website.
(megachurch pastor conmen)
On the contrary, Apple will savage decades old APIs just to marginally improve privacy [0]. Which is what Google would do if users were the customer.
Apple is problematic in many ways, but I'm glad there's at least one mega-corporation that's really staked out privacy and user experience as a selling point for paying customers.
[0] https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie-blocki...
autoplaying unmuted videos have been disabled on almost every browser, on desktop and on mobile, for years. This isn't unique to Safari and Apple.
This is specifically about autoplaying muted videos, which gifs and canvas can replace.
It was literally to work around their own restriction:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4531088
I've tried changing the autoplay setting from "block audio" to "block audio and video", but that breaks sites, especially the ones that assume you have autoplay enabled and don't have controls available. It's also hard to know when something's broken. I see a static image and I'm left to wonder whether it's a video that's hasn't started yet or it's actually a picture. For some sites, blocking autoplay don't even prevent the videos from loading because they start video playback during an onScroll event, which makes the browser think the playback was user-initiated.
If for some reason you absolutely have to spend time on a broken site like that it’s pretty easy to delete the video (or dickbar or ad or whatever) with the web inspector.
In general links to anything other than eg lkml or lwn make me pretty uncomfortable tbf.
It will require some fiddling on first visit through.
My filter list is here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aembleton/Arthurs-Annoyanc...
Compile your browser without support for video codecs.
99% of the time I don't care if no videos play back in my browser.
0.9% of the time the video is on youtube, so I can youtube-dl it to watch with mpv, which kicks the crap out of every in-browser video playback UI ever created.
The remaining 0.1% of the time I fire up a separate browser that does have video codecs.
Web video is simply unnecessary. Try life without it, you won't mind.
DNS-over-HTTPS adds a few kinks to this but does not prevent the inherent concept.
What‘s up with those videos? How do the increase positive metrics for websites?
That is the case for only a single country in the whole world
> It did well enough until there was real competition
"Real" competition doesn't have to artificially cripple high profile sites to compete. The chrome style of competition gave us ShadowDom v0 on youtube, disappearing features in maps and gmail, empty html elements that only seemed to be there to prevent Edge from accelerating video playback and constant popups reminding users to "upgrade" to Chrome.
(Microsoft and Brave both depend on Chrome, however.)