UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/62.0.3202.94 Safari/537.36

Example URL:

Steps to reproduce the problem:
A long time ago, media opened in a new background tab would automatically play. This was considered desirable by many.

One day, a change was made, so background tabs no longer autoplayed and after this, users were given a chrome flag to switch this back to autoplaying media if they wished.

Now, with another recent change, the chrome flag was taken out, forcing everyone to have no choice and no means to re-enable the previously existing and desirable behavior.

What does all this result in? We can't open stuff that we want to play in the background, without also clicking on the tab to start the media playback. This is very, very annoying, and so detrimental to workflows that users are switching to other browsers, since other browsers don't have this issue.

Previous bugs open for similar issues to this have been resolved as won't fix, so I'm opening a bug directly asking for what we want back. 

I propose either a setting to give us back this desirable behavior where media can autoplay when opened in background tabs, but at minimum include a chrome flag the users can change to bring this back.

To be explicitly clear, I am not asking for the flag back. I am asking for a way to re-enable the behavior chrome originally had. Users want this.

What is the expected behavior?

What went wrong?
The new chrome flag introduced that appears to apply to this autoplay policy seems ineffective for this use case. There are no workarounds known.

Did this work before? Yes 59

Is it a problem with Flash or HTML5? Both

Does this work in other browsers? Yes

Chrome version: 62.0.3202.94  Channel: stable
OS Version: 10.0
Flash Version: 

Contents of chrome://gpu: 

A bug was opened to bring the flag back, and was resolved as wont fix. What is so difficult about giving the users what they want BACK? https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=728108&can=2&start=0&num=100&q=&colspec=ID%20Pri%20M%20Stars%20ReleaseBlock%20Component%20Status%20Owner%20Summary%20OS%20Modified&groupby=&sort=