And just like that, Chrome auto-play is fixed
Yesterday Chrome started autoplaying YouTube videos on any page I’d visit. This was on both of my home machines and my work computer, with the only similarity between being that Chrome was signed into my account on each one. Today they all work normally again.
The issue seems to have been YouTube side as opposed to user side, although many users saw that disabling the Chromecast extension fixed it. The statement in the bug thread is as follows:
The YouTube team confirmed that there was a bad push yesterday which caused this issue to be triggered. There is a fix being qualified and that is scheduled to be pushed today that will correct this issue.
Since disabling the Chromecast extension fixed it for most, and the Chromecast extension hasn’t been updated in the past few days, it was probably from YouTube checking for Chromecastability and triggering play off of that.
Whatever the case, it didn’t seem to matter whether you were on beta or standard channels, 32 or 64 bit, it just mattered that you had the Chromecast extension installed (and possibly a Chromecast visible on your network), but it’s fixed now.
So, we’re blaming YouTube for yesterday’s annoying autoplay session as opposed to Google, who owns YouTube… OK, finger of blame pointed back.
You can read the reports in the bug tracker at the link below if you’re interested. If you didn’t have this problem, chances are you’ll luck out and get the next problem.
Yesterday marks the first time I’ve had to break out another browser just to keep from my speakers being blown out and my metered data and CPU usage going through the roof as multiple high-def streams started every time I opened Chrome.
It does worry me a bit that YouTube is pushing code out that’s designed to work with a plugin on Chrome without testing it on said plugin on Chrome. When you start wasting people’s bandwidth like that, the cable companies have ammunition to say “look, we slowed YouTube down because they’re wasting data due to sloppy programming and impacting our network,” and that justified slowdown leads to cable pay per play.
[Chromium]
