allow audio to play even when not initiated with a user's gesture

[meganrogge]

Under discussion currently, as this will impact all media with autoplay

When a user gesture doesn't initiate a sound, it won't play. You can bypass this with a chromium arg.

fix #176284
fix #178642

fyi @rebornix @amunger

[mjbvz]

@meganrogge Let's make sure this doesn't enable auto playing videos with audio on extension pages. You can use edit one the built-in extension's README.md to have a video tag such as:

<video autoplay>
<source src="http://127.0.0.1:8080/example.mp4">
</video>

I can help test this too if you're running into issues

[deepak1556]

The flag will affect all media tags across frames which have an autoplay attribute.

addressed

[deepak1556]

LGTM on the change, but I would leave the decision to @mjbvz on whether to enable this by default for all users.

[Tyriar]

If this is restricted to just the renderer (not webviews) then it's not a big deal imo, it will not work in web of course though.

[deepak1556]

Looking a bit more into the history of the autoplay policy in Chromium, it used to be that desktop allowed autoplay by default until the following feature landed in 2017 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=715049 to avoid annoyances to users from Ads on both mobile and desktop. The design doc also highlights the workarounds a website can do to get autoplay, checkout the Media Engagement section of the linked doc.

Based on the above I feel we can just disable the UnifiedAutoplay feature to get the default behavior of autoplay. @meganrogge can you replace the current change with change to L253 app.commandLine.appendSwitch('disable-features', 'CalculateNativeWinOcclusion,UnifiedAutoplay'); and see if it still addresses the issue.

[meganrogge]

Thanks for investigating @deepak1556 and yes that fixes it 👍🏼

[deepak1556]

Sorry I must have misread the diff, can you de-duplicate L253 and this one. We only need single app.commandLine.appendSwitch('disable-features'