No don't do auto play video, PLEASE GOOGLE! It's annoying enough everytime I view an article a completely unrelated video starts playing at the top of the page. Will just make the ‘Stop HTML5 autoplay’ extension a must have like adblockers.

Instant Search/Autocomplete is THE go-to spellchecker these days.
Can't really think of any other reason to have it, though…

AutoPlay is just Google's way of telling you to use Bing as your default search engine, I think… maybe they're about to buy Bing out?

I use Duck Duck Go as my main search engine now and don't really miss anything about Google.

Instant search is the first thing I turn off on google….so no loss there for me

My biggest annoyances on sites these days, thanks to adblockers, is auto playing videos. Yes it's great review sites etc have videos but honestly let me click play don't just assume I want to watch them….

I may not actually want to watch the video or I may be on a metered connection etc and if as in a lot of cases they have audio active (I hate this even more when using multiple tabs) it could be really inconsiderate to other people if all of a sudden you hear random media playing.

Now Google are doing this ‘for advertising’ rather than user benefits which says it all really.
Advertisers (and that includes google technically) are failing to take notice of people getting sick and tired of the amount of advertising online and instead of reacting by making things better they just seem to want to add in more things to annoy us… More and more people are using adblockers for a reason and that reason is there's just too many adverts online already.

Plus the instant loading of search results means you can't, say, load a search result and then immediately correct/change the search term based off of returned results because as soon as you start typing your results go poof. Great little change.

Ugh. NO AUTOPLAY! I already have to run extensions to block popups and annoying ass noisy ads.

Autoplaying videos can go take a running jump.

Is a magic 8 ball making the decisions at google these days?

iggy
Is a magic 8 ball making the decisions at google these days?

Autoplay vids should be tagged as malware

I wonder whether scrapping instant search is some sort of resource-saving measure? Obviously we don't know how it's all implemented, but ISTR that performing a search after every typed letter must be considerably more computationally intensive than just searching the once? It's not at all unusual for Google to make drastic changes to their services in order to save money e.g. forcing the VP9 codec on everyone in Youtube, even those whose processors were unable to smoothly decode it, and/or decreasing battery life. There's no reason they couldn't detect hardware capabilities and selected codecs dynamically, exactly like they do with ciphersuites - AES-GCM is chosen on machines with AES-NI or similar, otherwise chacha20-poly1305 is used, which is considerably faster in software.

And IMO I don't find any autoplay videos acceptable, the only exception being e.g. the main content on something like Youtube. An autoplay video means I'll usually just close the tab and avoid the website in future rather than trawling through the page to mute the wretched thing. I guess I'll be finding a more permanent way to disable them if this idiotic idea makes it through trials!

suddenly i find myself thinking, what's bing like these days…?

Personally I love the idea of Google autoplaying adverts.

Google, if you're going to shoot yourself in the foot, may I offer you the loan of a shotgun? Bazooka, maybe? Small tactical nuke?

But seriously, Google, are you really that stupid? That utterly, gob-smackingly, mind-bogglingly moronic?

Oh.

Okaaay, then.

:D

roger that;3840613
Autoplay vids should be tagged as malware

11 years between posts! That must be something of a record :)

Welcome back!

peterb
11 years between posts! That must be something of a record :)

Welcome back!

LOL good spot

Gonna be honest here, the only good place for autoplaying videos is when you're browsing porn sites so you can get a quick snapshot of whether you'd like the video or not or whether you're going to waste precious “you” time.

It wouldn't work in anything else for me because how can i get a snapshot of whether I would like a video on thorium reactors when all i see is an image of a guy talking, a glimpse of a reactor and some graphic?

Tabbykatze
Gonna be honest here, the only good place for autoplaying videos is when you're browsing porn sites so you can get a quick snapshot of whether you'd like the video or not or whether you're going to waste precious “you” time.

Maybe that's what they're aiming for. Perhaps their stats show that is what people use the internet for. After all, regrettably, as the song goes…*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTJvdGcb7Fs

*not necessarily my view, but…

Tabbykatze
Gonna be honest here, the only good place for autoplaying videos is when you're browsing porn sites so you can get a quick snapshot of whether you'd like the video or not or whether you're going to waste precious “you” time.

It wouldn't work in anything else for me because how can i get a snapshot of whether I would like a video on thorium reactors when all i see is an image of a guy talking, a glimpse of a reactor and some graphic?

I've heard, though not experienced, ahem, that if you hover over the thumbnails with the pointer, you get a quick summary of the video.

Good to see instant search die. I wonder if they can reverse the loss of Google Discussion search, which disappeared around the time as instant was introduced.

Auto-play is evil. Reminds me of the horrors of Flash adverts that use to start playing automatically on websites. Still, Firefox it can be turned off globally by setting media.autoplay.enabled to false.

Smudger
I've heard, though not experienced, ahem, that if you hover over the thumbnails with the pointer, you get a quick summary of the video.

It seems Youtube has started doing that now too. I wonder if the content creators get to choose what is previewed?

Smudger
I've heard, though not experienced, ahem, that if you hover over the thumbnails with the pointer, you get a quick summary of the video.

Depends - Not all sites have implemented this…

I am hostile to autoplay videos ANY time.
If google want me to stop using adblockers, then that is exactly the wrong way to go about it, and is exactly the sort of behaviour that prompts me to use one.
The only reason they generate earnings, is accidental clicks in the wrong place when trying to shut the damn thing up.

I am hostile to autoplay videos ANY time.
If google want me to stop using adblockers, then that is exactly the wrong way to go about it, and is exactly the sort of behaviour that prompts me to use one.
The only reason they generate earnings, is accidental clicks in the wrong place when trying to shut the damn thing up.

Smudger
I've heard, though not experienced, ahem, that if you hover over the thumbnails with the pointer, you get a quick summary of the video.

Hovering, which happens easily during normal browsing isn't in my opinion a reason either an acceptable reason for autoplaying, even a summary - which isn't typically what I have seen.
if it isn't autoplaying at the start, hovering will start it.

Dashers
Good to see instant search die. I wonder if they can reverse the loss of Google Discussion search, which disappeared around the time as instant was introduced.

Auto-play is evil. Reminds me of the horrors of Flash adverts that use to start playing automatically on websites. Still, Firefox it can be turned off globally by setting media.autoplay.enabled to false.

Looks like another reason to switch to firefox away from chrome, which given the apparent memory and loading improvements in recent betas might be worth me trying again.

I use firefox and disabled autoplay in the browser settings (not an extension). Can cause some real frustration at times to actually get the damn thing to play if you really want to watch the video, but so far I can live with it.

peterb
11 years between posts! That must be something of a record :)

Welcome back!

Thanks, didn't realise it had been that long. At least I can't be accused of spamming the board. :p

roger that;3845749
Thanks, didn't realise it had been that long. At least I can't be accused of spamming the board. :p

well done for remembering your password. Come to think of it given the forced password reset a few months back how did you even manage to log in?

ik9000
well done for remembering your password. Come to think of it given the forced password reset a few months back how did you even manage to log in?

Simple good password management.