Chrome 66 Arrives, Mutes Auto-Play Videos

Chrome 66 Arrives, Mutes Auto-Play Videos

This week, Google announced the public release of Chrome 66, which adds a crucial new feature for everyone: It mutes auto-play videos and other content on the web.

Can I get a Hallelujah?

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“The Chrome team is delighted to announce the promotion of Chrome 66 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux,” Google’s Abdul Syed announced. “Chrome 66 contains a number of fixes and improvements … it will roll out over the coming days/weeks.”

Mr. Syed is downplaying the significance of this release: Auto-play videos are arguably the single-biggest annoyance on the web today, and yes, I’m including advertising (which is freely and easily thwarted) in that assessment. Sites like ZDNet ruin the user experience by auto-playing a blaring video when you load an article. (Ironically, like this one describing the release of Chrome 66 and its muting of auto-play video. Cough.)

The addition of auto-play video muting comes on the heels of a previous feature by which Chrome users can now automatically mute an entire site, which I did with ZDNet a while back. But it falls short of the feature I really want, which is to disable auto-play videos all-together.

Chrome 66 has other new features, of course. Google is experimenting with a site sandboxing feature called Site Isolation which could help prevent malicious sites from stealing user data. (The bad news? It consumes more memory.) And it fixes dozens of security bugs.

If you’re already running Chrome, you can update to version 66 immediately by navigating to Customize and control Google Chrome > Settings > About Chrome.

If you’re not running Chrome, get with the program.

 

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Conversation 21 comments

  • rameshthanikodi

    18 April, 2018 - 9:41 am

    <p>I am so going to update chrome right now.</p>

  • Pargon

    Premium Member
    18 April, 2018 - 9:43 am

    <p>Even on build 65, Adblock plus already stops the auto-play video from starting on the link you provided….I just see a black box where the video would be!</p>

  • Daekar

    18 April, 2018 - 10:19 am

    <p>So… isn't this an old thing? I mean, why are they letting autoplay videos start and download automatically to begin with? I haven't had to deal with an autoplay video in ages…. in Edge, Firefox, Brave, or anything else really…</p>

  • johnbaxter

    18 April, 2018 - 10:49 am

    <p>It's nice that Chrome is catching up with Safari, Firefox, and probably others I'm not bothering to spin up.</p><p><br></p><p>I don't have Chrome installed, and have no intention of doing so except possible on a boot disk I plan to wipe shortly.</p>

  • jlmerrill

    18 April, 2018 - 11:13 am

    <p>Nice but Chrome or most anything Google is not my cup of tea.</p>

  • Nicholas Kathrein

    18 April, 2018 - 11:21 am

    <p>I love chrome but that's just me. Use what you like. </p>

  • William Clark

    18 April, 2018 - 1:14 pm

    <p>This is only partly working. When I click on a Yahoo article, the ad videos on the right side will mute, but if the article has a video associated with it in the main panel it will auto-play with sound.</p>

    • Stooks

      18 April, 2018 - 2:24 pm

      <blockquote><a href="#263912"><em>In reply to waclark57:</em></a></blockquote><p>This. I have never seen a audio/video blocker on Chrome completely work. Some stuff still plays. cnn dot com is a great test site and they autoplay everything.</p>

  • Stooks

    18 April, 2018 - 2:23 pm

    <p>Safari has had the option to mute the audio from auto play videos and a stricter option to not auto play anything. Better yet it actually works on everything that I have tried.</p><p><br></p><p>All browsers should have this.</p><p><br></p><p><br></p>

  • simont

    Premium Member
    18 April, 2018 - 4:37 pm

    <p>I can visit the ZDNet pages/All About Microsoft again without annoying videos 🙂 It doesn't stop video's playing on CNN though. But its progress.</p>

  • fbman

    19 April, 2018 - 1:52 am

    <p>Good read, I will still stick with Firefox. I have never used the world biggest piece of malware or adware.. sorry Chrome. </p><p><br></p><p>I don't understand, People moan about facebook leaking private information, MS taking telmentary etc .. but when Google does it, everything is fine.. Chrome is properly one the best way google harvests this information.</p>

  • generalprotectionfault

    19 April, 2018 - 3:21 am

    <p>This and reduced performance on lower end hardware were the big losses of the general move from Flash–&gt;HTML5. Blocking AutoPlay has been much clunkier. (It's still impossible on Edge and IE, but of course it is).</p>

  • skborders

    20 April, 2018 - 2:37 pm

    <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent;">"It mutes auto-play videos and other content on the web". </span></p><p><br></p><p>Interestingly, Edge has had this feature for a while.</p>

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