The Codist

I am so sick of going to a website and then seeing a video which loads and then autoplays. This means I have to sit there and wait for it to waste my bandwidth, then tap the pause button.

Even worse are the people who cleverly hide the controls, or move the damn thing around on the page. Often I switch to Safari reader mode but people break their document up so it doesn’t work. It’s bad enough when people clobber their own page with ads or requests for signups or other irritating crap. But the autoplay videos are the worst sin.

I like to read, I don’t care to sit there and watch anything unless I expressively push play. Previously when people used flash you could disable the flash plugin and the videos and especially the video ads just couldn’t play. Now with html5 you can’t stop them as simply. I know there are plugins and extensions and hacky things I can install but I don’t care.

It’s time for the browser manufacturers to band together and make a standard way to say “NO” to autoplay videos. If I turn them off I don’t even want them downloaded until I push play. Sure it might be a little inconvenient on youtube but I just want control. I am the user, I demand to be in charge of what is wasting my bandwidth and what I see and hear.

I remember once visiting a job search site and it had an autoplay video (a loud one) that immediately played “so you’re searching for a job” which would be so much fun at work to explain.

Is this really that hard for people to understand that I don’t want their stupid video playing if all I want to do is read the article or post or website? Is it really that hard for Apple, Google, Mozilla and Microsoft to decide on a simple implementation of giving the user control of autoplay again? This isn’t rocket science.

Lets go people, lets say NO to autoplay video without turnoffication!