Stop Videos from playing automatically on websites

The most annoying thing on the internet these days is the auto-playing videos on websites. These promotional videos are scaled-down and hidden in some corner of a web page. These videos just start automatically, and the most annoying part about them is the audio that can blast your ears out of nowhere.

The videos may be relevant to the content, but you may not want that video to just shoot up automatically. Most of these videos run on the HTML5 Player or the Flash Player. This article is a guide on disabling autoplay feature in HTML5 and Flash players for different browsers like Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Internet Explorer.

Stop Videos from playing automatically

If you want to stop videos from playing automatically in Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox or Chrome, you will have to:

Use a browser extension
Change the browser configuration settings
Disable Flash & HTML5.

Let us see how to do this.

1] Disable video auto-playing in Google Chrome

Google Chrome is the most popular web browser these days, and yes it supports disabling the autoplay feature. You can disable both HTML5 and Flash video autoplay. To disable HTML 5 videos, we are going to use an extension called “Disable HTML5 Autoplay”. Click here and download the extension to install it on Google Chrome. Once installed you can select that red play icon from the address bar and disable autoplay.

Disabling autoplay using this plugin is for sure very easy and can save you a lot of time. Now check out how to disable auto-playing Flash videos:

Go to ‘Settings’ and scroll down and click on ‘Advanced Settings’.
Under the ‘Privacy’ section, you can find the ‘Content Settings’.

Open ‘Content Settings’ and scroll down to find ‘Flash’

Chose “Ask first before allowing sites to run Flash” from the options available.
Save the settings are you are done.

Now you may not see any video auto-playing itself. For any reasons, if you want to revert the changes, simply revert the settings and uninstall the extension. This will work on the Microsoft Edge browser too.

2] Turn Off auto-playing of videos in Mozilla Firefox

The autoplay feature can be easily disabled on Mozilla Firefox as well. To disable automatic playback, you can follow these steps:

Type “about:config” in the address bar and wait for hidden configuration settings to load.
Now search for “autoplay” and find “media.autoplay.embed” setting and change that setting to false.

Autoplay for HTML5 videos will now be disabled, and the videos will not start automatically. Now to disable Flash videos go the Firefox menu and select Add-Ons. Now go to the Plugins page and find the flash plugin. In the dropdown corresponding to ‘Shockwave Flash’ select ‘Ask to Activate’ and that is it. No more auto-playing videos on Mozilla Firefox.

In later versions of Firefox, type about:preferences#privacy in the address bar and hit Enter,

Scroll down a bit, and click on the Settings button against Autoplay. Here you can allow or block audio or video on websites.

Also, when visiting a website, you can click on the video-play icon next to the URLto change the Autoplay permissions for that particular site.

TIP: This post will show you what to do if you want to ONLY mute the Sound in auto-playing Videos.

3] Stop video autoplay in Edge

Follow this post to disable video autoplay in Edge Chromium. You need to:

Open Edge Settings
Go to Site Permissions
Select Media autoplay
Control audio or video autoplay.

Edge Legacy does not support disabling the autoplay feature for HTML5. Also, the browser is not yet open to extensions that can let you do so. Nevertheless, you can disable flash videos autoplay by completely disabling Adobe Flash from the ‘Advanced Settings’.

Go to ‘Settings’, and then hit the ‘Advanced Settings’ button and now you can turn off the Flash Player.

4] Disable Flash & HTML5 in Internet Explorer

You can follow very similar steps to disable Flash in internet explorer so that the videos do not have autoplay.

So this was all about disabling the autoplay feature in different browsers. You can head up to this link to check whether the HTML5 autoplay is working or not. If the video starts automatically then probably you’ve missed out on some step. Follow the steps again to get it right.

Bonus Tip:

Stop videos from playing automatically in Facebook News Feed

You can also turn off Facebook video autoplay settings on or off if you want to stop videos from playing automatically on your Windows computer. Click Settings > Click Videos > Autoplay Videos Drop-down Menu > Select Off.