Search giant Google has announced that it would roll back a recent update to Google Chrome browser. The update, according to tech users, reportedly broke the audio embedded in several HTML5-based web games. The company, however, pointed out that such update will be implemented in October.
Why audio is not working properly in Google Chrome?
This decision to defer the reimplementation of the feature has earned the dissatisfaction of may Web-based developers. In an attempt to explain the issue, Google’s Product Manager John Pallett in a post on the Chromium developer forums has admitted that the search giant “didn’t do a good job of communicating the impact of the new autoplay policy to developers using the Web Audio API.”
With this, the present version of Chrome which is version 66 would no longer automatically mute Web Audio objects. Whatever contents embedded within HTML5’s <video> and <audio> tags would still be silenced.
Pallett also said that this temporary rollback would actually “to give Web Audio API developers… more time to update their code.” He added that the browser’s auto-muting is expected to be brought back for Chrome version 70 in October.
“Unfortunately, the great majority of existing work will not be updated by October, or ever, and so we still face the effective cultural erasure of those works in October,” QWOP developer Bennett Foddy writes in the Chromium thread.
“You guys have the power to break everyone’s work, should you wish to exercise that power, but you do not have the power to make people add workarounds to code that they are not able to alter,” Foddy added.
