UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/65.0.3325.181 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce the problem:
1. open a youtube video in a background tab by right clicking and selecting "open in a new tab" on the video, then observe the video does not autoplay like it used to. you have to click/focus on the tab for media to start palying
2. find the autoplay policy flag and change the setting to enable autoplay without interaction. this previously was an acceptable workaround, however the flag is also no longer effective
3. file bugs and comments along with many other users, and get pushed back as wontfix for no given reason by a few specific developers who refuse to fix the problem or help users with a workaround. silently close bugs as wontfix and ignore everyone

What is the expected behavior?
1. autoplay to function as it did previously without any flags, or,
2. autoplay to function as it did previously with the autoplay flag (the flag used to be called "gesture required" or something like that and was remade into the current autoplay flag), or,
3. add back the old gesture requirement flag so we can re-enable the desireable autoplay behavior, or,
4. help users out with a workaround to this issue that was previously not present

What went wrong?
bugs continue to be filed requesting for a fix for this, and the same handful of devs keep closing as wontfix and not providing any feedback or comments or any help. bugs are closed silently and users are ignored.

Did this work before? Yes 

Chrome version: 65.0.3325.181  Channel: stable
OS Version: 
Flash Version: 

see bugs,  bug 834871   bug 728108   or   bug 821444   or   bug 816547   or   bug 787568   or   bug 814058   or search for more related issues