Flash in Chrome doesn't play in background tabs

J

JJ Johnson

Gawd
Joined
Jun 26, 2008
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802
I'm running Windows 7 Professional, with the latest version of Chrome and Flash Player 18.0.0....

This just began recently: When I open a page in a new tab (or I open a set of bookmarks) that contain Flash video, the video doesn't begin playing until I give each tab focus. It used to begin immediately, in the background.

Is there a setting for this? If so, where would I find it?
 
This isn't recent. This was done earlier this year (even earlier if you were testing out Canary builds). It's literally a feature (i.e. not a bug).

From a general-user standpoint, it makes far more sense to delay load, much less play, any flash content that has not been visible at least once. What if you had 20 background tabs with YouTube videos firing off all at once? Oh, the cacophony.... Not to mention the load it would place on the system (goodbye laptop battery).

That said, I could see how background autoplay would be a useful in, albeit, limited scenarios. Say if one of the tabs loading in the background were a music video.

I don't see an option to revert it back to the way it was before. You're probably in the minority here. You could always put in a request for a Chrome extension (which is where the blocking idea came from in the first place, ironically).

As a side comment: Chrome is probably not using your Flash player plugin. FWIW, Chrome has Flash built-in to the browser by default.
 
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Hey, thanks a lot for the reply. I had begun to wonder if it was a security setting or something else I might have done and not realized. I'm not sure why, but it only began happening for me in the past week or two.

One application: On a daily basis I load up a set of about 10 construction cams to watch progress on a building being built. Only one of them is a live video camera (with no audio), the others are still photos that are captured every 30 minutes or so and displayed in Flash player. The photos are large and they take a few seconds each to load from a fairly slow site (earthcam.net). What I find annoying is that since the photos do not begin to load until I give a tab focus, I can't just click a tab and see what's happening. What I've had to do is any time I refresh all the tabs (using Chrome's 'Reload All Tabs' extension) is quickly Ctrl-Tab through them all to get each of the images to load.
 
I've looked into this a bit further and found that there are a couple of simple options to enable the old behavior of Flash always starting up in background tabs. You can do any one of the following:

  1. Under: Settings > Advanced > Privacy > Content settings... > Plugins

    Change the setting to 'Run all plugin content'. This will allow any plugin to run at any time.

  2. Under: Settings > Advanced > Privacy > Content settings... > Plugins > Manage individual plugins...
    (or directly: chrome://plugins)

    Set Adobe Flash player to 'Aways allowed to run'. This allows only the Flash plugin to always run.

  3. Under: Settings > Advanced > Privacy > Content settings... > Plugins > Manage exceptions...

    Add a domain or hostname exception such as [*.]earthcam.net - Allow. This is the most restrictive option.
 
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