Google rolls back automatic sound blocking on Chrome 66 version

Google has rolled back an update released with Chrome 66 that introduced autoplay restrictions on sound. Videos in Chrome windows are automatically silenced with this, but that happened with a number of web games and art projects.

To fix the issue, Google has released a new version of Chrome 66 that removes the autoplay functionality for the Web Audio API. According to Google’s product manager John Pallet, this change won’t suddenly cause audio to be heard on auto-starting videos on the web, as the autoplay restrictions remain in effect for the HTML audio and video tags.

Pallet says this workaround was designed to give developers for the Web Audio API more time to update their code. Chrome 70, due for release in October, will reintroduce full autoplay restrictions. Some developers think that is still too soon and believe that a large majority of the work will not be updated by October.

Due to the update, some web games were no longer able to play sound, even though these games required a mouse click to launch. The problem would have been solved if the games ran the Javascript AudioContext API, but that has been little used by developers so far.

Chrome 66 was released in mid-April, with the main improvement being stopping videos from autoplaying when the sound is on by default. Videos that do not have sound on will still play automatically. In addition, the new version allows users to export all passwords at once.