It used to be that if you wanted to play a video, you’d have to click it to play it. However these days there seems to be a trend in which quite a few websites will play videos the minute it loads the page, meaning that if you have multiple tabs open, or if you have headphones on, you might be rudely greeted with video suddenly playing out of nowhere.However the good news for Chrome users is that Google will soon bake autoplay blocking into the browser itself, meaning that you won’t have to rely on third-party extensions. This is according to a recent post on Google’s blog in which Google will block videos from playing automatically, although there are some caveats.
According to Google, “Starting in Chrome 64, autoplay will be allowed when either the media won’t play sound, or the user has indicated an interest in the media. This will allow autoplay to occur when users want media to play, and respect users’ wishes when they don’t. These changes will also unify desktop and mobile web behavior, making web media development more predictable across platforms and browsers.”
However this doesn’t mean that Google wants to kill autoplay completely. According to the guidelines, Google encourages developers to consider muting autoplay videos so as not to annoy visitors, and that they should use the browser’s native controls video controlling playback.