A feature introduced to mute the audio of auto-playing videos ended up dumbing down millions of online games
It all stems from the best intentions of Google’s developers: to block and mute web pages with auto-playing audio content, even if they were inside a tab or window that was not active. Taking advantage of a list of “reliable” sites based on users’ tastes and habits, the engineers in charge of Chrome were able to block audio for tens of thousands of portals.
Unfortunately, within this immense cauldron went to end up even sites that had little or nothing to do with Google’s original intentions. With the update to Chrome version 66, Big G’s developers managed to mute those annoying videos and audios by acting on some HTML 5 and JavaScript language specifications, usually used to start the automatic playback of multimedia elements. Too bad, however, that by doing so they have unintentionally “tampered” with thousands of blameless portals.
Millions of unusable games
The (alleged) improvement made by Google developers, in fact, has also affected thousands of portals not present in the white list used initially. Among them, a lot of them hosting online games based on HTML5 and JavaScript: Chrome thus ended up silencing millions and millions of videogames accessible via browser, which suddenly found themselves “voiceless”. A condition that neither online gamers nor the developers and administrators of the portals have been able to remedy.
Google changes Chrome and withdraws the update
After days and days of criticism, Google has been forced to retrace its steps, withdrawing (at least partially) the update it had introduced in mid-April 2018. The withdrawal will be in “force” until October 2018, when Google will introduce it again with Chrome 70. During this time, they let know from Mountain View, developers will have to update the source code of their applications, so as to fall within the white list and find themselves again … without a voice.