Safari and Chrome Updated to Autoplay Muted Videos on Mobile ⇥ wsj.com

Jack Marshall, Wall Street Journal:

Apple Inc. and Google made tweaks to their popular mobile web browsers recently to enable video content to play automatically in web pages, provided audio is muted.

The changes could result in a boost in mobile video consumption for online publishers if they allow their videos to play automatically, and it could unlock new revenue opportunities as a result.

Looking forward to my cellular carrier finding more revenue opportunities for all of the data this is going to use. Canadians already pay the highest prices for cellular contracts in amongst developed countries. I certainly don’t want to pay for overages when a website like Mic or iMore decides to load an autoplaying video ad somewhere on the page.

I’ve set up a rule in 1Blocker, in the Hide Page Elements package, to block video[~autoplay]. This is broad, but it should prevent autoplaying video elements from loading in Safari.