Editing 1280: Mystery News

{{comic
| number    = 1280
| date      = October 21, 2013
| title     = Mystery News
| image     = mystery news.png
| titletext = If you find and stop the video, but you've--against all odds--gotten curious about the trade summit, just leave the tab opened. It will mysteriously start playing again 30 minutes later!
}}

==Explanation==
With the introduction of tabbed browsing, many users, even on widescreens, will have so many tabs open that it is hard to find any given one. At 44 {{w|Tab (GUI)|tabs}} on {{W|Google Chrome}} on a {{w|1080p}} screen, the user can no longer see any text on the tabs. Long before this point (~20 tabs), the text is so short as to be unusable. Randall refers to this tendency to open many tabs without closing them in this comic.

Many modern tabbed {{w|web browser|browsers}} can remember what tabs were open upon closure if this setting is on, and will reload the same tabs on startup. This will start any auto-playing videos, such as YouTube videos (although some browsers, like Firefox, have since fixed this by forcing videos to pause), which appear on any of the open pages. This situation can also occur during browsing when an auto-playing video does not begin playing until after a user has moved on to a new tab, when a page with a video refreshes in the background, or when a site with such a video automatically opens in a tab that does not become the active tab when it opens.

This generally leads the user to clicking through all of the open tabs to try to find where the sound is coming from. This can be even more difficult if the video is not obvious and not centered on the screen of whatever tab it is playing in. Years after the release of this comic, Google Chrome began to indicate to the user which tabs are playing audio, thus alleviating this problem.

The title text refers to websites that {{w|meta refresh|refresh in the background}}, causing videos (and ads) to start playing again even if you stopped them previously. Many news sites, such as CNN, will do this if you [http://www.holovaty.com/writing/23/ stay on the same page for 30 minutes].

==Transcript==
:[Cueball sitting at a laptop.]
:Laptop: It's day five of the trade summit, and still no...
:Cueball: ''Dammit''
:''click click click''

:I get most of my news from autoplaying videos in browser tabs I can't find.

:''Title text'': If you find and stop the video, but you've--against all odds--gotten curious about the trade summit, just leave the tab opened. It will mysteriously start playing again 30 minutes later!
{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]