Chrome 66 will kill autoplay by default

Chrome 66 will kill autoplay by default

If you're a Chrome user and hate autoplay adverts, videos or any other content that you seemingly didn't want playing, then the next release of the browser is going to be right up your street. Chrome 66 will ship out with a new element in that kills autoplaying elements by default. No longer will you have to check each tab to see which one is blaring out that song you didn't want playing, or try and kill all those random videos to cut back on your bandwidth usage.

The big focus of the anti-autoplay technology though is sound. In its writeup, Hexus reports that muted autoplayed content can still play, whether it's designed to loop or just play through once, however, if there is the hint of a sound, it'll be blocked and the video or audio content will not be allowed to even start.

What may need a bit of tweaking of course, is sites like YouTube or Vimeo, where autoplaying video content with sound is an often enjoyed feature. It may be that you'll need to You'll be able to whitelist those kind of domains in the new Chrome version, just as you'll be able to blacklist the worst offenders, making it so that no autoplay content can ever launch from their domains, whether it's muted or not.

Also coming along with Chrome 66 is a set of new developer features, letting them play with a new Clipboard API, as well as new CSS features for advanced web page creation. Here's a video of some of the more exciting features that can be expected in the next Chrome release.