Thanks for looking at that gorhill. So they hide things like the video under DOM elements, very interesting. I guess that must explain how some extensions, say a youtube extension, can block out the ads in a youtube video without breaking the functionality of the video itself - so the user can watch the video without having to sit through the ad.
Is that what you would be doing with the load-on-demand code you are talking about, make it recognize when the video element was going to start trying to auto-play and stop this, yet not stop access to the video all together? If so, this sounds like an elegant solution to the problem.
When the video started to auto-load I tried to use the picker to pick the video and block it, but it wouldn’t select it. Then I tried to use “inspect element” in the Firefox developer tools to find out where it was in the code, hoping to cobble together a filtering rule. Not knowing enough about webpage coding, obviously I wasn’t able to locate where in the code it was coming from.
So, I used the logger to find out where the video was coming from. As you know from looking at the page, I was able to fairly quickly home-in on the culprit - player.ooyala.com. So I used the logger to block the player and I was about to just go on about my browsing experience reading the article, but then I thought about it “wait a minute, I might want to watch that particular video, and if I block the player then I won’t be able to.” So then I started hunting through the logger for a way to block just auto-play. But as you saw when you looked at it, there are many elements related to the player, and I was unable to find which one would stop it - if blocking any of them would have.
The reason for this long post is to illustrate a problem that I think is very serious for a number of people now, and only going to get more serious for even more people as they go along. Here in the USA, more and more Internet Service Providers are seeing the profitability of ending unlimited bandwidth plans and putting people on “metered” plans where you pay by the gigabyte of data you use. With some ridiculously low number of gigabytes in the plan and then charging a ridiculously high amount of money per GB after you use up your ‘plan’ gigs.
I don’t currently have that problem, I am again on an unlimited data plan. But, I had that problem before and quickly saw that with today’s Web, you can quickly burn through all your GB - the videos (for example youtube) and movies (say Netflix) and such you do want to watch and then something that I realized but most others don’t even think about, things like these sites that automatically auto-play videos on their pages or even worse ‘cache’ the whole video and then auto play it. It all adds up, 2 MB for this video and 10 for that video, etc. If you’re a heavy surfer, you can quickly blast through all your allocated data.
So, if you and others can help stop this with adblocking extensions and other extensions, and the filter list maintainers as well, you would be providing an even greater service to users than the great service you already are with blocking the ads. For most of us, the ads and “video auto-starts” are an annoyance. For others, they are also an expense.
I hope this post wasn’t too long winded and possibly annoying to you, I just think this is such an important problem to address that I wanted to explain my reasoning about it. I think it is going to become more and more of an issue, as more and more ISP’s see the profitability other ISP’s are getting from “metered” plans and more and more of them switch over to it as I think will happen in the future.
And thanks again for this wonderful extension that already does so much to help make the browsing experience better for the average user. It is greatly appreciated.