Suggestion: Do not auto-play video / audio from the overlay web browser on game startup

[Manachew]

Before I get into this, I do want to say that the new overlay UI does look much more manageable than the previous in-game overlay. Previously it seemed rather unwieldy, but now with the modular approach it actually doesn't seem as daunting to try to use it. Thanks for the change!

I recently had an issue in one of my games, Thea 2, where it was playing a seemingly random audio track when launching a game. I thought it had something to do with the new client update or perhaps a bad game update, but eventually found out that it was due to the overlay web browser auto-playing a video on one of the tabs it had open from a previous session. It was playing audio from open browser tabs that were set to a Steam store page for a different game. It was also muting the in-game audio itself.

I don't think it makes sense to auto-play video & audio from the overlay web browser when a game is launched; especially since the game might not even have fully launched by the time said video & audio start playing. It's not immediately clear what the source of the noise is, either.

I'll list out the steps to reproduce this effect:

1) Open a game
2) Open the Steam overlay in-game web browser
3) Navigate to a Steam store page that has a video, and make sure the volume is turned on (I successfully reproduced it with the store pages for Master of Magic & Apex Legends, both of which have distinct audio playing from the get-go)
4) Minimize the in-game overlay without closing the browser tab

Note: you can also click on one of the images in the store page rather than a video, and the effect will still occur.
5) Quit the game
6) Start the game

I hope that this gets changed before other users run into this problem!

[Garou]

Agreed. Any form of video or audio autoplay can be very annoying.

[AVSManfred]

Well opening link to a video on browser have caused it to get inresponsive, tho considering it was link from Discord there is a chance it could be due to vid oepning as download link (steam browser tend to do weird stuff like that) and already tested that uloading files to open file browser bricked overlay too tho looks like this window got auto-closed on next oppenign of overlay in the game where i tested that but game where i have tab with vid open ramains bricked cuz i can't close this tab due to inresponsive interface