Addressing a major user concern of autoplay consuming data and interrupting browsing experience, Google posted on their blog about the new feature. While the smart Autoplay has been there on Chrome Canary (beta version of Chrome) for a while, Google will finally roll out the update for Chrome soon.
About Unified Autoplay
According to Google’s blog post and autoplay roadmap, the new features regarding autoplay are being added to give users control over the content that plays automatically. Firstly, the new feature will allow autoplay only for the content that does not have audio or is muted. Secondly, the content will play only when you click somewhere on the website, which means you get enough control to scroll through an entire page without any annoying pop-ups. Also, if you have a website added to your home page on your phone, autoplay will not mute or stop for that. The feature not only filters annoying autoplay content but also allows websites to play content based on your usage and media playback from the site. While these are not the only features, Chrome may become just a little more smart with Autoplay. Google Chrome Canary has had a feature that allows you to mute a website’s audio so whenever you open that website, the audio remains muted until you manually whitelist that website. This feature may also be added to the stable Chrome version with this update.
When will this update roll out?
According to Google’s Autoplay Roadmap, Site muting will be available in the stable version with Autoplay policies in Canary, starting in October. By December this year, Autoplay will be available to Beta users and finally in January next year, everyone will be getting the smart autoplay feature for Chrome.
