GOOGLE CHROME AUTOPLAY VIDEO BLOCKER DOWNLOAD

I hate video ads too, but I don't see how they can do this without similarly causing lots of annoyances. I'd think the only reason YouTube would be able to get away from it when browsing is because it's set up as a 'single page app' (clicking a related video activates JavaScript to rearrange the page, rather than requesting a new one).Īnd if they make exceptions for YouTube, suddenly they're taking an anticompetitive advantage as a video site. That may sound whiny to complain about when it happens once, but consider the number of video links people tend to share, and it's adding a lot of extra aggravating clicks. How can they have a workaround? This would mean that ANY time somebody links you to a video on YouTube, you would have to click the link, and *then* click somewhere on the loaded page to play the video. Yes but YouTube will have a workaround ready before it launches. No promises though.Ī quick test with developer tools and a random video doesn't show the network request until I click it. I am now sometimes on a metered connection, and let me tell you, does it ever save data.

GOOGLE CHROME AUTOPLAY VIDEO BLOCKER DOWNLOAD

I know if you use the about:config settings to block images, they don't download the images. My question is, do you know if these settings will force the data for the media in question to not be downloaded until you click play? Media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground: true I'd never known this until now - the pages with multiple simultaneous adverts drove me nuts.

Very rarely a site uses something to get around it, but for the most part, I need to manually hit 'play' to start a stream. It's one of those things I've taken for granted now that I have it. I thought it blocked autoplay video as well, but I guess I just set that flag in about:config so it would be nice if they also made it a default (or at least a toggle in settings so the average person doesn't need to know about the more advanced settings options). While you're at it, copy Safari and let me mute by clicking on the little speaker icon displayed on the tab.įirefox also does this. Auto-playing audio on ads encourages people to immediately close the page (meaning that they don't see any ads beyond the top of the page) and never come back (meaning that they don't see any ads on the site ever again), which is bad for Google's bottom line. Google's priority here, as the internet's biggest ad company, is for people to use the internet as much as possible, to visit pages as frequently as possible, and to engage with ads as often as possible.

Keep in mind that Google's been pretty aggressive about ads that they see as abusive - they will issue bans from their ad networks for advertisers and sites that use them, and they'll drop search ranks for sites that have them - and this falls into that pattern. I don't, and I can't really see them doing that in general. That way you can't block 'their' youtube ads. I suspect Google is doing this because they will remove the ability to block ads thru extensions. Ads are very probably one of the main reasons they're doing this.

Google chrome autoplay video blocker