Microsoft's Edge and Google's Chrome browsers could be getting improvements to media playback when it comes to videos embedded on websites, ensuring that these clips don't start playing before they become visible. Or at least that's Microsoft's goal based on work it's apparently doing on Chromium, the open-source engine that powers Edge and Chrome (as well as other web browsers).
Microsoft's proposed change would cause media playback to pause while a video has not yet fully played on a particular page. Currently, there may be a situation where a website is still loading (and an embedded video has not yet appeared), but it starts playing and you hear audio without any image.
With Microsoft's update, the video will pause while the browser is still loading the web page and video, and will only play when everything is ready (and the video is displayed on the screen). This is clearly a much better way of working, as there won't be audio seemingly playing out of “nowhere” for a short period of time before the embedded video actually appears in the browser.
This problem often occurs due to the way media elements are integrated into websites (or web applications), the most common way to do this being “iframes.” An iframe, which is short for “inline frame,” is an element on a web page that effectively loads another “page” within the original web page, and that content can be temporarily hidden while the main website loads.
This sequence of events is what causes the sound of an embedded video to play before the image portion of the video is rendered, and it can be confusing or disconcerting—you might even think there's a problem with your PC.
Microsoft's proposed changes to Chromium
Microsoft's proposal to achieve this is to introduce a new policy for Chromium that controls how iframe media playback works. Essentially, the policy determines whether the embedded video (the iframe) has been rendered, and if it hasn't, the video clip (both audio and visual elements) is paused while the rendering process continues. Playback will only begin when everything has been fully rendered and the video clip has appeared in the browser.
This incoming change for Chromium was spotted by Windows Latest, but it's still too early for Microsoft to take this step. It might take some time to develop the feature and implement it in Edge and Chrome (or other web browsers), and it will need to be tested before it reaches the release versions of these browsers as well.
We might see the feature in testing in a few months, so fingers crossed. I think this could make browsing a more pleasant and less distracting experience, particularly if a web page has multiple embedded videos. The good news is that it's not just Microsoft Edge users who will benefit, but also people using other Chromium-based browsers, as we've already mentioned.
