Autoplaying videos are almost everywhere and that is annoying.
In this post, we will see the methods to stop autoplay videos on Chrome and Firefox. Let's get started.
Stop Video Autoplay on Chrome Browser
The Chrome's inbuilt option to stop flash videos is not working properly.
So, I suggest
If you want to enable the flash for some reason, then click on the extension and choose the option you prefer.
This will only stop the flash videos. The HTML5 videos still play in your browser.
To stop the HTML5 videos from autoplay, download this Chrome extension Disable HTML5 Autoplay.
Stop Video Autoplay on Firefox Browser
- Open Firefox.
- Press Ctrl + Shift + A or type about:addons.
- Click on "Plugins" section and find "Shockwave Flash" plugin.
- Click the drop-down menu besides the plugin and choose "Ask to Activate" option.
The flash videos won't autoplay anymore. The next step is to stop the HTML5 videos in the Firefox browser. To do that, follow the below steps:
- Type the following in the address bar
- Search for this option
- Once you find the option, right-click on it and select "Toggle" option. This will change the value of the option to false.
about:config
media.autoplay.enabled
From now on, the HTML 5 videos won’t autoplay in your Firefox browser.
But, the above method of the Firefox has one problem. This will stop Vimeo videos playback.
So, I suggest
I hope that the information in this post is useful to you. If you’ve questions, feel free to ask me in the comments section.
If you find the information in this post useful to you, please share this post with your friends.
Are you using any other methods or plugins to stop video autoplay? Let us know in the comment section below.
Very helpful thank you.
Hi Steve,
Thanks for your comment. I'm glad it was helpful.
Keep visiting.
Grr! I'm glad this info is out here to help people, but as we see from the comments and from personal experience, ad companies and developers are always finding new ways to get their autoplay to work. I think this is some basic functionality that's missing from all the major browsers - we shouldn't need an extension or anything in order to view the web the way we want to. :/
The "Let Me Choose" option is not available to me as a choice
Changing the media.autoplay setting in Firefox also stops all animated GIFs.
These suggestions to block autoplay videos in chrome used to work for me, but suddenly all manner of website autoplay videos are getting through! I have repeated reset to only play when I allow, I have selected "disable" of adobe flash, I have also used independent flash blocker extensions--these worked in the past but NOTHING i stopping autovideo play lately! I have even removed and then reinstalled chrome and started over. I simply cannot figure out what the problem is, esp since these measures used to work fine for me, but no longer.
Firefox has an addon called FlashStopper that can permanently block Flash and Html5 per website or allow for session, and other features. I haven't tried it yet, but may sson.
Thank you so much.
It works for me.
There is no "Plugins" sections to be found in Google Chrome 55.0.2883.87 m
So how do I stop autoplay for videos in the newest versions of Chroome?
I have same problem as Gary: There is no “Plugins” sections to be found in Google Chrome Version 55.0.2883.87 m (64-bit)
So how do we stop autoplay for videos in the newest versions of Chrome?
Hi Gary and Greg,
Thanks for updating me about this and sorry for the late reply. I've updated the post with new way. Try it out and let me know how it works.
Thanks.
I noticed in Firefox that if you disable media.autoplay.enabled,
the Vimeo website will not play videos anymore. You click the play button and nothing happens.
(I tried this in Windows 10)
Any thoughts ? Possibly some other setting among the myriad of mostly undocumented
settings FF has ?
Hi Davexnet,
Sorry for the late reply. Thanks for notifying the problem. I've updated the post with the fix for this problem. Please check it out the post and let me know how it works.
it does work 29/5/17. thanks heaps
I use Chrome. The extension you linked to to stop autoplay doesn not work at all. HuffPo videos come blaring thru.. I checked that it was enabled. I checked the right boxes.
Any other ideas?
thanks --
Hi Sally,
I checked the Huffpost videos and they don't autoplay. Please try the steps in the post once again. I hope that will work. Thanks.
Thanks for posting this, Thirumal. I installed both Chrome extensions, which has blocked Yahoo's autoplay videos.
Thank you so much! HuffPost was really pissing me off with their autoplay. Looks like they are using HTML5, and the extension you mentioned works great.
I don't understand why sites are doing this. The internet pretty much decided, about 10 years ago, that this was an annoying practice and should be stopped... not sure why they need to restart it again now.
Used to work, but doesn't anymore. I hate autorun video so much I may abandon the internet and go back to shopping in stores.
Thanks kindly for this post, but I also have Chrome and using BOTH Disable HTML5 and have Flash blocked in my settings still allow many sites to autorun videos (JW Player is most offensive) Newsweek site still autoplays videos
example: http://www.newsweek.com/richard-epstein-why-trumps-tax-plan-welcome-594733
Please do add any suggestions that you think may help. Can you go into Chromes advanced VERY detailed options in the address bar and change something?
This one worked on 'newsweek.com' whereas the other one did not:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-autoplay-blocker-by/khhablkjeghmeinlfgecddpgcopnljpm/reviews
How do I stop the floating videos that move to the right automatically once i scroll by them and stay there. super annoying. Dailymail does it and im ready to stop goin going to the page. I have installed "disable html" from chrome store and that only stop s auto play but video box still follows me upon scroll down.
thanks
@ Matt
Hey Bro! Since I read a lot of news sites, I've seen that same thing and it IS very annoying. What I use to read all of these articles, which not only makes reading them MUCH easier, but also USUALLY covers over the video players with the full text, is I use a Chrome add-on called, 'EasyReader'. I HIGHLY recommend it. I use if for bloody EVERYTHING! : ) In most cases, when you engage the 'Reader' and click on the body of the main text, the Reader's interface with just the text and usually normal picture inserts covers over everything else including video players and other advertisements.
I hope this helps!
Cheers!
Thanks. Will give it a try now.
One good thing about maintaining an XP system,
html5 is not supported so no autoplay nor video at all!
Makes for a lighter internet and can take care of Flash in the
Firefox/add-ons/plugins/ask to activate
On my Android Phone Firefox has an option to stop them, but there is no
equivalent setting on the Desktop version
In the Phone/Firefox settings I see "allow Autoplay" - off/on and "Plugins" - touch to play/enabled/
disabled
I have about 7 blockers and they dont work. Is there a browser itself that blocks this garbage autoplay ?
Dude, first and foremost, make SURE that you use only CHROME. That way, these add-ons or extensions mentioned above WILL work. Just use the 3 extensions here + the Easy Reader add-on to read articles and that's it. That works just fine for me about 95% of the time. I would personally suggest after getting these specific extensions, disable your other blockers because they MIGHT be interfering with these ones that work.
It's that simple mate...
I just got off the phone with tech support for my satellite internet service. We get 10 Gb of high speed data service per month, after which we get a "pass" where we are at their lowest priority service and get between 0.15 and 1.0 Mbps of data during peak hours. We went over my usage pattern over the last month. I used my 10 Gb of data in TWO DAYS! He gave me all sorts of recommendations on how to conserve my data. One of the main steps is to turn all video streaming services to low res and to turn off all autoplay videos. Do today's web developers and news sites not realize that there are a lot of folks that are not privileged to have unlimited internet service and have to conserve every byte of bandwidth? It's really annoying not having control over how I receive my data from these sites.
That's a good point! I had not thought of that...
I have both the changes in place: Ask to activate under add ons. And for html5 changed status to false.
Yet many sites such as Yahoo News (https://www.yahoo.com/news/) start auto streaming videos.
just add a custom filter
*i.cdn.cnn.com*
@UblockBro
That sounds really nice, and I personally don't need it, but do you think you could PLEASE be a little more specific...? Add a custom filter to 'WHAT'? How EXACTLY does a person do that? I've found it REALLY hard with some of these blocking add-ons to 'customize' some of them. One, you have to go to GitHub and I TOTALLY get lost there.
PLEASE: take a moment and kindly show how and where to create a 'custom filter', and please specify WHICH program.
That would truly be helpful and awesome, thank you!
The Chrome extension to block HMTL autoplay says "read and change all your data on websites you visit."
That sounds awfully suspicious.
You are awesome! Thank you so much for providing help for those annoying videos.
thought it worked but installed add-on did NOT stop cnn videos from autoplaying 🙁 looks like it's back to the drawing board!
since my previous comment is not posted (rejected?), i'm unable to update it...
flashstopper has worked! got excited at the possibility of halting the annoying autoplay videos of cnn & forgot to restart my browser 🙂 now that i've restarted it, cnn videos are not autoplaying [yay!]
The "Disable html5 Autoplay" is no longer supported, says the developer's website. And, the extension appears to have stopped working properly as of October 21, 2017. At the same time, my Opera has started crashing increasingly (individual pages crashing, not the software itself). I traced this back to the extension. Any idea what next? Firefox seems still able to stop html5 autoplay but can be quite bloated and slow otherwise. A new browser, Brave, has been launched, based on Chromium. It seems the most effective to my non-expert eyes. But, Brave does not support many extensions. There seem to be workarounds with which you can supposedly add your preferred extensions (e.g., Evernote), but I could not make those work (these involve downloading the source code and then installing modules for downloading extensions from Google Play). Any other ideas as of October 21, 2017?
It's called using 'Chrome'... : )
Sorry, don't mean to be TOO facetious, but C'mon guys, some of you insist on using these outdated, arcane, 'weirdo' browsers. Look, it's REAL easy. Just use Chrome. Period. It is the most streamlined, consist, automatically updated most USED browser. GEEZ, are people really still using Firefox for Goodness sake! Look, if you just don't like Google, fine. But, don't be complaining when this and that doesn't work, there aren't enough extensions, etc., etc...
Or, I personally really don't like Microsoft, but if you don't mind them, then just use theirs. It is far, FAR past time to screw around with all these oddball browsers. Things are just TOO integrated and universal now. Just my lowly and wretched opinion...
Unfortunately, this entire post doesn't work anymore as of 25 November 2017. Chrome version 62 has removed the ability to use about:addons and about:config. The only Flash setting they'll let users touch is the "Ask first (recommended" setting with a Yes/No option, and add specific sites to the block or whitelist. The extension isn't being supported anymore at all either. It seems like the only option to stop websites like CNN from their stupid autoplay strategy is to simply stop using them.
I switched to Chrome because Firefox got too big and started taking its users for granted. Now Google has done the same exact thing with Chrome.
Yeah, that's too bad. Well, whatever combination of add-ons that I am using that I mentioned above still seem to be working just fine. So, you might look back on the thread here and see which add-ons that I suggested. One is another Flash blocker and one is an html5 blocker, and I think some other one.
And, YES, good for you that you FINALLY have gotten away from Firefox. Dude, that thing has been SO overdone and past it for like 10 years now. Stick with Chrome. Unless you start getting really esoteric, it's the best, most updated, most secure one there is.
Unfortunately with the new Firefox 57.0 Update the Flash Stopper plugn no longer works. What does work is -
about: config
search for - media.autoplay
double click to toggle from TRUE to FALSE.
Doing this will render Vimeo videos unplayable until you toggle the status back to TRUE
Also - Disable HTML5 plugin for Chrome is no not supported by the vendor
Hi,
I use Chrome. I often read news on thatstamil.com website. Almost all of their news articles have videos which start buffering as soon as I open a news article and I am on a limited data bandwidth. I installed DisableHTML5 which has stopped auto-play but the video is still buffering. I have even installed Flashcontrol but that doesn't seem to be working either.
You might add this to Chrome. It has helped block a number of things that the others didn't:
Video Autoplay Blocker by Robert Sulkowski
Also, I don't know if it will help, but you might also consider both Ghostery and uBlock Origin.
Addon no longer supported in FireFox Quantum.
Any other ideas?
See above...
Dump Firefox...
Use Chrome : )
Bad news: The Firefox addon add on is no longer supported. Good news: The addon is no longer needed. The current version of Firefox makes Click to Activate the default for Flash and setting the media.autoplay.enabled setting to "False" stops HTML5 autoplay WITHOUT breaking Vimeo.
Hey, that IS good news! : )
And, even BETTER news... Use Chrome... 😀
I just did the change to Firefox to stop HTML5 stuff from autoplaying and then tested it on CNN, which is one of my pet annoyances for autoplay. I tried it on a few different news topics, all of which had played idiot videos before I made this change tonight...thank you for this tip, I am most entirely grateful.
Ah, I FINALLY saw a suggestion somewhere for Chrome that actually works, AND ON CNN! It's so dang easy, I'm honestly surprised that nobody has mentioned it yet.
You just go to the hidden features in Chrome buy typing in chrome://flags/ In the search bar type 'autoplay' When that section comes up, just select the 'User' document / controlled, I don't quite remember the exact wording, but you will see.
And THAT my friends, is that! : ) FINALLY!
That basically tells Chrome to allow the USER to start any autoplay or videos...
There you go...
Now, you can dump the overbloated, slower, less secure, and antiquated Firefox 😀
Address bar, not search bar, sorry...
Thank you very much. This worked in Firefox, even on CNN! Much appreciated.