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Some trackers will still be unavoidable, but Safari is supposed to cut out the vast majority of them. It does this by automatically cutting off websites’ access to tracking data left on your computer by websites you don’t regularly visit, so that advertisers can’t gather too much data on you. Controls are also tucked away inside Safari's preferences menu.Īnother thing that's really nice about Safari in High Sierra is a new feature that prevents websites and ad companies from following you around the web. It's fast enough to change once you know where to look, but it took some searching for me to find it. You have to go to the Safari menubar menu, click "settings for this website," and then find the "auto-play" drop-down to change it. If you do want to change Safari's behavior here, the toggle is a little bit hidden. That's not going to create enormous problems for these sites or their subscribers, but I'm sure the companies behind them will be plenty annoyed with Apple. The same goes for DirecTV Now, which was whitelisted, and Sling TV, which didn't appear to have to go ahead to autoplay with sound.
UPDATE TO OS MAC SIERRA TV
There seems to be some inconsistency among TV streaming sites, though: for instance, it looked to me like HBO Go was whitelisted, but HBO Now was not. That makes enough sense, since we want videos to play when we go to those sites. YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Twitch, Crackle, Vudu, and DailyMotion are among the sites allowed to autoplay videos with sound turned on by default. Safari tries to be smart about which sites it blocks autoplaying video on, too. Safari also mutes those annoying ads that start to play sound only once you mouse over them (which you inevitably do by accident, not because you're interested in them), even when they would normally get activated, which I was particularly happy to see. I tested it out on a number of websites that include autoplaying videos on their pages, including Bloomberg and CNET, and Safari always paused the videos before they could start to play.