Microsoft is trying to improve browsers like Edge and Chrome by tackling annoying video playback issues for smoother browsing

Microsoft’s Edge and Google’s Chrome browsers could get improvements on the media playback front when it comes to embedded videos on websites, ensuring these clips don’t start to play before they become visible. Or, at least, this is Microsoft’s aim based on work apparently underway in Chromium, the open-source engine of both Edge and Chrome (plus other web browsers besides).

Microsoft’s proposed change would make it so that media playback is paused while a video isn’t yet fully rendered on a particular page. Currently, you can get a situation where a website is still loading – and an embedded video hasn’t yet appeared – but it starts to play, and you get audio with no picture.

With Microsoft’s update, the video will be paused while the browser is still loading up the web page and video clip, and it’ll only play when everything’s ready (and the video is displayed on-screen). Clearly, that’s a much better way of working things that won’t have audio apparently playing out of ‘nowhere’ for a short time before the embedded video clip actually appears in the browser.

Often this problem happens because of the way media is embedded in websites (or web apps), the most common of which is ‘iframes.’ An iframe, which is short for inline frame, is a web page element that effectively loads another ‘page’ within the original web page, and that content can be hidden temporarily while the parent website is loading.

This sequence of events is what causes the sound from an embedded video to play before the image part of the video is rendered, and that can be confusing or disconcerting – you might even think your PC has a problem.

Microsoft’s proposed changes to Chromium

Microsoft’s proposal to realize this is to introduce a new policy for Chromium to control how iframe media playback works. Essentially, the policy determines if 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 early days for this possible move by Microsoft. It could take some time for the feature to be developed and applied to Edge and Chrome (or other web browsers), and it’ll need to be tested before hitting release versions of these browsers, too.

We might see the feature in testing in a few months, perhaps – so keep your fingers crossed. I could see how this could make browsing a more pleasant, less distracting experience, particularly if a web page has several videos embedded in it. The good news is that not just Microsoft Edge users will benefit, but people running other Chromium-based browsers should do too, as we mentioned.