Why do Videos have to Automatically Play in Chrome?

The question of the day is "why do videos in Chrome have to automatically play?" It completely sucks, but I do not want to give up Chrome! Every time I land on a page at CNN, there is a video that starts to play. It starts with an advertisement, is Google getting a kickback from them?

Now I know that you can find some plugins that purport to block videos. I have not found one that works satisfactorily. And that is because the place you need to stop this is during page rendering, not afterwards. Come to think of it, Chrome does allow you to do that for sound, so why not video? I have been computer programming since 1976, and with all that we have learned in over 44 years I simply cannot see that adding an option to the browser engine to block videos during rendering would be all that difficult.

Oh wait, it is not that hard! In Safari there is an option to disable the automatic playing of videos, and you can watch when you want to by clicking the big white play button that is shown. Look, there is the option in preferences!

And wait, Firefox can do the same thing. I need two screen shots, one to show the preferences :)

And Edge Chromium! Yea, it is handled in Edge Chromium with a settings option!

So what gives with Google? It turns out that this feature is in Chrome on my mobile device, so specifically what gives with Chrome on the desktop?

I really should give up on them, but I don't want to. All my developer friends tell me to, but more people use it and that makes it the browser that I need to check against, and the developer tools are so much better than FireFox and Safari.

So if you are like me, you want Chrome but what this stupid mistake to change, then complain! The best way to get attention is to go right to the top. Send an email to Mr. Sundar Pichai at sundar@google.com and point him to this post!

Hmm, we will have to see how long my blog stays alive on BlogSpot after posting this :)