Right, that's the point. How often do you browse a web page and never click on anything or highlight any text? If you're interacting with a SPA like Twitter or Facebook, it's impossible for you not to have a user action by the time you run into a video. It's fairly common for web articles to put everything except the first two paragraphs behind a "click to expand" button. What that does is force you to invisibly give them permission to autoplay audio.
Chrome introduced a solution where in practice, videos still all autoplay (the demo doesn't show this, but if you start a video muted you're still allowed to autoplay it), and then 15 seconds into browsing the page you still get hit with a blast of music. And in the process of doing that, they also broke a substantial number of web games.
And, also, the restrictions don't apply if you're browsing within a domain, so if you click on a CNET article and then click a link to another CNET article, now the second article has permission to play even without a user gesture. "In response to a user gesture" is such a weak protection. Highlighting text counts as a user gesture.
My preference would have been for Chrome to just auto-mute that tab as soon as audio started playing, and allow the user to unmute it themselves not as a gesture that "implies" consent, but by explicitly clicking the unmute button.
I don't think the current solution solves anything at all, I think it's worse then what we started with. Particularly on mobile, it's extremely easy to accidentally tap on a website. In my opinion, it's effective the same thing as just allowing autoplaying audio, I feel like they might as well have changed nothing.
Edit: I've got a longer article I wrote in 2018 that goes into more problems, but a lot of them are orthogonal to the current conversation and are mostly focused on the impact to web games and criticizing Google's communication with developers, so I tend to just directly link to the demo when talking about it nowadays (https://danshumway.com/blog/chrome-autoplay/)
Chrome introduced a solution where in practice, videos still all autoplay (the demo doesn't show this, but if you start a video muted you're still allowed to autoplay it), and then 15 seconds into browsing the page you still get hit with a blast of music. And in the process of doing that, they also broke a substantial number of web games.
And, also, the restrictions don't apply if you're browsing within a domain, so if you click on a CNET article and then click a link to another CNET article, now the second article has permission to play even without a user gesture. "In response to a user gesture" is such a weak protection. Highlighting text counts as a user gesture.
My preference would have been for Chrome to just auto-mute that tab as soon as audio started playing, and allow the user to unmute it themselves not as a gesture that "implies" consent, but by explicitly clicking the unmute button.
I don't think the current solution solves anything at all, I think it's worse then what we started with. Particularly on mobile, it's extremely easy to accidentally tap on a website. In my opinion, it's effective the same thing as just allowing autoplaying audio, I feel like they might as well have changed nothing.
Edit: I've got a longer article I wrote in 2018 that goes into more problems, but a lot of them are orthogonal to the current conversation and are mostly focused on the impact to web games and criticizing Google's communication with developers, so I tend to just directly link to the demo when talking about it nowadays (https://danshumway.com/blog/chrome-autoplay/)