How to Stop Auto-Play of Videos in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge

Multimedia content is one of the primary types of content consumed by internet users all over the world. Nowadays, some websites—serving videos—choose to autoplay them for the visitor. This can be annoying for a good percentage of visitors. Reasons can be many! You simply just don't like it and want full control over video playback. Or, you have limited internet data, or you're visiting a NSFW website and just don't want autoplay of videos. Whatever the reason, in my opinion, except in some special cases, autoplay of videos isn't what's going to make most of your website visitors—happy. If you often get annoyed by this autoplay of videos, there's a way to stop it until you explicitly play them—at will. The following tutorial will help you block the autoplay of videos on some of the most popular modern web browsers viz., Google Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge. It'll take just a couple of minutes to activate the autoplay of videos on all of these web browsers. Make sure to hard refresh the browsers after settings are fully done.

Google Chrome method can be used on other WebKit-powered web browsers too. The easiest and the most effective ones is the Firefox blocking method. I block the auto-play of videos on all of my browsers.

Let's get started and see how we can easily block the auto-play of videos, either through a native browser functionality or through an effective add-on. Avoid old versions of these browsers to get the best results.

Stopping Video Autoplay in Firefox Web Browser

Firefox natively supports the video autoplay blocking option within its settings. There's no need to install a 3rd party add-on or extension. And, it works flawlessly without any issues. Here's how to disable video autoplay within Firefox.

Go to Settings → Privacy & Security → Permissions → Autoplay → Settings... option.

It'll open a dialogue box as shown below.

Firefox video autoplay setttings dialogue box

Select the Block Audio and Video option from the drop-down menu and click the Save Changes button. That's all you need to do! Once close and restart the browser, and you're good to go.

Stopping Video Autoplay in Google Chrome

Though Google Chrome provides an option to somewhat restrict the autoplay of videos in its settings, it's not an absolute blocking option. Apart from activating that option, one also needs an add-on to make things work. Let's see how to do it.

First, the native settings partially get the job done on a conditional basis. Though it doesn't solve our problem, it's good to know about the setting, as it may change in the future to support full video autoplay blocking.

Go to Settings → Privacy and security → Additional content settings → Sound option. Here you can select to stop websites from playing sound automatically. This essentially blocks video as well on some websites. But, it doesn't work everywhere.

A better way is to install an extension called HTML Content Blocker which delivers what we want.

After installing the add-on, make sure you select the Media tab as shown below.

Make sure to first clear the web browser's cache and then restart to let the add-on take its full effect. You can thereafter test the blockage on your favorite video streaming websites.

Stopping Video Autoplay in Microsoft Edge

Quite similar to Google Chrome, Edge does provide a setting to stop video autoplay on a conditional basis. The deciding factor is whether, on a website, you've interacted with the media in the past or not. So, first, we'll enable this feature and then will go on with the add-on configuration.

Go to Settings → Cookies and site permissions → Media autoplay option. Here, select the Limit option from the drop-down menu. But, this isn't going to block every video on every website.

To make that happen, install the Disable HTML5 Autoplay extension. No manual configuration is needed after installation. It just works out of the box.

In case, you want to disable the functionality for specific websites, you can easily configure that within the add-on settings as shown above. Make sure to clear the browser's cache for settings to take full effect.