At the time, there was a lot of noise about the fact that autoplay settings were breaking parts of the web, and I do think that was a problem with Chrome's setup that never really got addressed. My article focused only on Chrome's changes.
Firefox's approach was (imo) better -- it didn't have as much of the weird AI-driven "figure out which domains users interact with" nonsense -- but Firefox's approach was still very clearly influenced by Chrome's, and I would argue that Chrome's approach was incorrect.
At the time, there were two concerns, and Chrome's approach was only intended to handle one of them:
1. Autoplay videos use a lot of bandwidth
2. Autoplay videos are disruptive (specifically, they make noise)
Chrome was worried about #2. They argued (and I agree with this) that these are two separate concerns that need to be tackled separately. But Chrome didn't really go all-in on solving problem #2, they kind of had this weird hybrid approach where they were still trying to stop the data from being streamed, but not always, and if you muted the video it would still be streamed, but if you didn't it wouldn't...
So it became the worst of both worlds.
At the time I argued (and I still think this would be a better approach) that given that the goal was entirely about stopping audio, this should have all been handled through automatic tab muting, not through a change to the web APIs.
That's not to say that blocking large amounts of data or stopping the visual aspects of videos isn't important, but the approach Chrome went with (and that Firefox has subsequently inherited) kind of does nothing well. And I think we still see the effects of that today, even in browsers like Firefox that were admittedly a bit more sensible about not adapting some of Chrome's worst ideas.
Interactions were also a sticking point: Chrome interpreted even highlighting text as a signal that autoplay should be allowed -- which is obviously very easily abusable. I generally think that the user-gesture requirement for permissions is not great; it severely limits what users can do on a page while still signaling that they don't want to grant permission for a random action like autoplaying audio.
It's a tricky problem to solve, but I also think it's a problem that's harder to solve because of some of the previous baggage we've inherited from previous efforts to solve it.
At the time, there was a lot of noise about the fact that autoplay settings were breaking parts of the web, and I do think that was a problem with Chrome's setup that never really got addressed. My article focused only on Chrome's changes.
Firefox's approach was (imo) better -- it didn't have as much of the weird AI-driven "figure out which domains users interact with" nonsense -- but Firefox's approach was still very clearly influenced by Chrome's, and I would argue that Chrome's approach was incorrect.
At the time, there were two concerns, and Chrome's approach was only intended to handle one of them:
1. Autoplay videos use a lot of bandwidth
2. Autoplay videos are disruptive (specifically, they make noise)
Chrome was worried about #2. They argued (and I agree with this) that these are two separate concerns that need to be tackled separately. But Chrome didn't really go all-in on solving problem #2, they kind of had this weird hybrid approach where they were still trying to stop the data from being streamed, but not always, and if you muted the video it would still be streamed, but if you didn't it wouldn't...
So it became the worst of both worlds.
At the time I argued (and I still think this would be a better approach) that given that the goal was entirely about stopping audio, this should have all been handled through automatic tab muting, not through a change to the web APIs.
That's not to say that blocking large amounts of data or stopping the visual aspects of videos isn't important, but the approach Chrome went with (and that Firefox has subsequently inherited) kind of does nothing well. And I think we still see the effects of that today, even in browsers like Firefox that were admittedly a bit more sensible about not adapting some of Chrome's worst ideas.
Interactions were also a sticking point: Chrome interpreted even highlighting text as a signal that autoplay should be allowed -- which is obviously very easily abusable. I generally think that the user-gesture requirement for permissions is not great; it severely limits what users can do on a page while still signaling that they don't want to grant permission for a random action like autoplaying audio.
It's a tricky problem to solve, but I also think it's a problem that's harder to solve because of some of the previous baggage we've inherited from previous efforts to solve it.