Auto-playing videos are arguably one of the most annoying things that can be found online nowadays, especially when you have a lot of open tabs or if you can"t find the video where the sound is coming from. Google itself has already acknowledged and tried to fix this by blocking videos from playing automatically in its Chrome browser.
But it seems that the company isn"t done with its efforts on that front, and it has now announced improvements to the feature. In a blog post, Google said that Chrome will now look into your browsing history and habits to determine where auto-playing videos should be blocked and where the user might not want that to occur.
The company fleshed out the details of how the feature works:
Chrome does this by learning your preferences. If you don’t have browsing history, Chrome allows autoplay for over 1,000 sites where we see that the highest percentage of visitors play media with sound. As you browse the web, that list changes as Chrome learns and enables autoplay on sites where you play media with sound during most of your visits, and disables it on sites where you don’t. This way, Chrome gives you a personalized, predictable browsing experience.
While the newly announced improvements may be more useful, users might be skeptical of having Chrome go through their browsing habits to enable them. The enhancements should already be live as an update to the Chrome browser, so interested users should check for updates if they haven"t already.