Chrome will soon defer playback of background autoplay media and block flash ads

Your Chrome browsing experience is about to get a lot better and far less annoying thanks to these two new features that are coming soon.

The first is deferred playback of autoplay media for background tabs. Right now, if you open a tab in the background that has autoplay media, it will start playing in the background when the page finishes loading, and you then have to hunt for the tab and silence whatever is playing. With this feature, Chrome will wait until the tab is in the foreground to start playing autoplay media, thus causing less annoyance and also using fewer resources for background tabs.

The second feature is where Chrome will automatically pause Flash ads and other non-essential Flash content on the page. Soon, Flash ads will have a gray box asking the user explicit permission to play them. Google advises ad partners to switch to using HTML5 ads, as they use fewer resources to run than Flash content.

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