Disable video auto play

Brass Contributor

Edge had a great feature that let me disable all autoplaying videos and I could whitelist certain sites.

 

Chrome works differently and tries to guess based on playing with audio or not. I want more control and I want to be able to disable all auto play videos, regardless of sound, and selectively whitelist certain sites.

 

#EdgeInsider

12 Replies
Hi @ClaireNovotny, thank you for your feedback. We are looking into our media controls, in order to give our customers the best experience of the web. I will forward on your comments to the media team.
Thank you!

there is a option called Autoplay policy inside edge://flags/

@Deleted That isn't quite the same behavior as what Edge had:

 

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-policy-changes

 

This flag talks about "user gesture required" with the page, which is confusing. 

 

Quite frankly, the Chrome behaviors are confusing to understand and some of the switches require command line arguments. 

 

A simple option like Edge had would be a huge improvement.

Has this been resolved. I have started using Canary as my daily driver, however, the inability to prevent videos from autoplaying may drive me back to edge...quickly

 

 


@ClaireNovotny wrote:

Edge had a great feature that let me disable all autoplaying videos and I could whitelist certain sites.

 

Chrome works differently and tries to guess based on playing with audio or not. I want more control and I want to be able to disable all auto play videos, regardless of sound, and selectively whitelist certain sites.

 

#EdgeInsider



@ClaireNovotny 

Absolutely imperative to put this under user control, IMHO.

NEITHER audio nor video should NOT play unless *I* *explicitly* say so.
I don't care if audio is MP3 or ogg or whatever format...it is all noise!
I don't care if video is MP4 or animated GIF or whatever...it is all unwanted distraction!

I REALLY don't care if this breaks the business model of sites.
My eyes/ears. My circumstances...
I don't care if CNN won't like me :)

Personal preference: say "no autoplay, ever" to 100% of sites but I guess that others would like to whitelist some sites.

@transentia 

 

Install Chrome extensions: Silent Site Sound Blocker and AutoplayStopper . Works every time (almost). Don't forget uBlock Origin.

@ClaireNovotny 

I'd also like full disabling of ALL auto-play: video, audio. Users should be able to whitelist sites if we ever do click to play any media (like YouTube, for example). Perhaps like a "Play once" or "Auto-play at any time". 

 

Essentially, all media (audio / video) should be click-to-play, as an user option in Edge C. You can make the default auto-play everything: I don't mind. But, the "deny auto-playing media" option must be extra-vigilant.

 

No triggers, like "user interaction", should be able to override the denials. Just because users make the "fatal error" of inputting text into a text box (i.e, writing a comment on Imgur) should not mean any ad from any company can now play video or audio.

Thanks. I will try these.

They can't be as good as a proper user-oriented facility built into the browser, though.

I guess that Microsoft has an opportunity here: they have been trumpeting about how much Google 'spyware' they have taken away from Chrome. Now they have a chance to follow up on this by putting some some good USER-oriented features.

My guess is that they will just replace Google 'spyware' services with Microsoft 'spyware' services instead. One can hope and dream, however.

@transentia 

 

Push for web development is driven largely by advertising and goods & services sale revenue. I don't think any large browser developers will incorporate full adds blocking features. Instead they try to soften user experience by more intelligent algorithms for ads show including video and audio ads.

@sambul95  I have looked and I don't have this on my browser

Thank you for this, media auto playing is the most annoying thing. AutoplayStopper seems to do the job.

@bobpave 

Hi,

To give the autoplay stopper extension a good trial, go to https://www.yahoo.com/   and see how it performs there. At least for me it fails to prevent quite a few video's from auto playing.

David