If you’re the type of person who detests autoplaying video ads with sound, Google’s Chrome browser provides some help. Google Chrome 66 will mute autoplaying video by default, permanently, so even if a video pops up—and Chrome can block some of those, too!—it won’t blow you out of your seat. The Chrome 66 release is now live in the stable channel.
As Google explains here, muted videos will always be autoplayed. But autoplayed videos won’t always be muted. Google uses what it calls the Media Engagement Threshold to determine if a video should be muted. (Google’s page goes into the details, though it’s a typically complex Google algorithm.) Put simply, if you’ve played a video on the site before, with sound, Google may think that you want to hear the audio for another video on that site, too.
