This is madness! NO! This is autoplay!

Why, oh why?

Today I was updating this website. I wanted to add Director and the release year of the movie in the UHD Movies List. When I search information about movies I normally go to IMDB and this time was no exception since IMDB offers all the basic information what I normally need about movies. Of course there is ratings etc. but mostly I do not care about those since many times people have just a bad taste about movies and those ratings are meaningless ;)

Anyway when I was on the IMDB and started searching movie by its name the auto complete started to annoy me a little bit since it was quite slow. I don't mean slow by the terms of internet speed but instead of slow user interface. Of course reason for that sluggishness in UI was my computer since I was using my ThinkPad T500 which is already very old. For me this is still my newest computer purchase even tho not the newest by age. I have multiple much newer computers at home but this machine is dedicated for Linux usage and this I like to use if there is no necessary reason for use another machine. This just works in basic usage and I like Linux so why not. Of course when I was on IMDB (or almost in any regular website) I easily can see the age of this machine since pages feel slow because sites nowadays are basically mostly bloated crapwares.

If we forget that part that IMDB website UI generally feels sluggish because it needs more powerful computer than what I chosen to use, there is still much bigger problem than general slowness. This biggest annoyance what I am referring to is of course a trailer video autoplay. Like what on earth? Why IMDB by default starts to play trailer video even I have not specifically selected it to play? C'mon! I am not intersted in your trailers and if I am, I can press play on that trailer if you just add a placeholder where it says "Play trailer" or just use image from that trailer and add play-button image on top of it so I can see that it is video what I can click to play.

Auto playing videos are just annoying. Those just uses the internet bandwith without adding much value for the user and those videos just requires extra computing power than it is necessary. On my case that bandwidth does not matter since I have 600/100 MB cable internet with unlimited data transfer, but if I would have been with mobile internet on another country that would drained data transfer quite fast. In worst case scenarios those auto playing videos have also audio enabled by default and that is insanity. On IMDB there was no audio on those auto playing trailers what is a good thing, but still, auto playing video itself is bad design choise itself.

Don't you think about the nature!

Green values are now quite often in news and have been already many years as you might have noticed. It feels very strange that there is so little talk about the energy usage of computers, networks, required hard disks and other things computers need to store and share data over the web. Internet is huge waste of energy and big part of this could be avoided just by making more common sense decisions in web pages.

Even I personally don't believe those "green values" in general, I still hope that things like Green Coding would get more attention. For my point of view it propbably would limit current era of insanity on modern web in many ways. At least if big companies would like to continue their virtue singaling abut how they care the nature they would have to make better choices on web page development if they really would want to waste less energy, bandwidth on internet and resources on users computers. I don't believe that big companies would drop their annyoing ads and user hostile tracking cookies, but at least they probably could stop making auto play videos on their sites. Hopefully, but still not probably.

If you are really worried about waste what computers and IT in general does, be part of the change and start doing small websites, use old computers or new ones what does not require much energy. Used old computer still is less wasted nature resources anyway so make best use of it if you can :)

2023-03-05