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Youtube overriding Safari's autoplay settings?

MisterMark

MisterMark

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 28, 2017
14
6
Netherlands
Hi,

I hate videos on websites that automatically start playing when loading the site. I don't want that to happen. Never. :D
So I am very happy with Safari's new Autoplay settings. Obviously, I set it to "never Auto-Play" for all websites, including Youtube. However, I just noticed that Youtube will just go ahead and play a video when I click it. It just disregards Safari's settings. Sometimes, it will work correctly when I reload the site, but when I click the next video it just autoplays again.
Anyone else seeing this? Is youtube doing something that ignores the autoplay setting?
 
Last edited:
My understanding is that Apple intentionally whitelisted certain sites, YouTube and Netflix being some of them.
 
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MisterMark said:
Hi,

I hate videos on websites that automatically start playing when loading the site. I don't want that to happen. Never. :D
So I am very happy with Safari's new Autoplay settings. Obviously, I set it to "never Auto-Play" for all websites, including Youtube. However, I just noticed that Youtube will just go ahead and play a video when I click it. It just disregards Safari's settings. Sometimes, it will work correctly when I reload the site, but when I click the next video it just autoplays again.
Anyone else seeing this? Is youtube doing something that ignores the autoplay setting?
Click to expand...

Autoplay blockings intended purpose is to block non essential videos from playing. Usually these are ads embedded in articles. And for this function I've found it to work rather well.

However if you are on YouTube and you are clicking a video its a safe assumption you want to watch the video. I find the feature does work on YouTube though for the ads. If I set it to Never Auto-Play and goto the home page (www.youtube.com) the video ad will not play.

So its not that YouTube is doing something to ignore it, its that you are. Other similar websites are the same way, Vimeo for example if you click on a video a new page will load and you'll see the video.

This is the fine line they walk between useful feature and inconvenient nuisance though. If people had to start using multiple clicks and autoplay (as in autoplay next video) didn't work they would turn it off and need to deal with ad videos again.
 
Thanks for the replies, @shadedred and @cynics.
Yes, it does make sense the way @cynics describes it. However, if I recall correctly, it wasn't like this during the beta's. Videos on youtube would never autoplay, not even when I clicked one. I always had to click the play button.
And actually, thats the way I prefer it. Sometimes when I click a video, I like to read the description or the comments first, before watching the video itself.
Anyway, no big deal. If t works like it's supposed to work, I'm fine with it.
Thanks again!
 
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I wonder if this is perhaps some setting that could be double checked? I am on the proper release of High Sierra and disabled auto-play for YouTube and it's working perfectly as expected.

Edit:

If you got to Safari preferences ->Websites -> Auto Play

Here you get a list of the sites, and I just made sure YouTube is set to 'never autoplay'.
 
LCPepper said:
I wonder if this is perhaps some setting that could be double checked? I am on the proper release of High Sierra and disabled auto-play for YouTube and it's working perfectly as expected.

Edit:

If you got to Safari preferences ->Websites -> Auto Play

Here you get a list of the sites, and I just made sure YouTube is set to 'never autoplay'.
Click to expand...

Yes, that's how I set it up on my Mac. And the strange thing is that it sometimes works after I reload the site. But the next video I click just autoplays again...
Apparently this is how it's intended to be (see above).
 
MisterMark said:
Yes, that's how I set it up on my Mac. And the strange thing is that it sometimes works after I reload the site. But the next video I click just autoplays again...
Apparently this is how it's intended to be (see above).
Click to expand...

Sorry! Must not have taken in your original post properly, was skimming on the train to work! I've just tested this on my personal MacBook Pro, and played through some YouTube. I refreshed, did next video, clicked some random videos, paused, played etc. And I can't seem to reproduce the behaviour your Safari is exhibiting... And I have never had it in general usage either...

This is all a tad strange.
 
Murgatroyd314 said:
No, it is NOT a safe assumption. Not when I have specifically set Youtube.com to "Never Auto-Play".

I want to watch videos on my schedule, not theirs.
Click to expand...

I understand what your point however I think my confusion is why would one click on a video they don't want to watch? Read the comments or something? Just curious....
 
cynics said:
I understand what your point however I think my confusion is why would one click on a video they don't want to watch? Read the comments or something? Just curious....
Click to expand...
That's part of it. Another part is my habit of multitab browsing - I'll open a video in a new tab, but not actually watch it until after I've finished reading whatever it was linked from.
 
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I think there's some confusion here about what Autoplay actually is. If you click on a video it will likely start to play. This is by design and not Autoplay. Autoplay is when you go to a web page and a video just starts playing without you interacting at all. Some examples of this would be ads, your Watch Later list on on YouTube, the videos associated with news stories on Fox News, etc.
 
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