Disable Auto-playing Videos on Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera and Internet Explorer

Last Updated on March 7, 2017

The auto-playing videos are seriously annoying and should be abolished from existence. Major sites like CNN and CNET sometimes play the auto-playing videos which seriously annoy me.disable auto-playing videos

If you have a slow PC or phone, these auto-playing videos can seriously slow down your browser rendering the website useless. Most people with better computers won’t notice, but if you are rocking that 5-8-year-old laptop of yours, then this can become a problem.

One thing you can do to avoid this slowdown is to run Windows in performance mode. This will make your PC run in full powered mode. But, this will come in addition to increased power consumption, and that’s not something we want.

Disable Auto-playing videos on Chrome

  • Open Chrome and go to the Settings. You can do that by typing chrome://settings in the Omni-bar. You can also open the Settings by clicking on the menu icon on the upper-right corner of the screen and selecting Settings.
  • In the Settings screen, scroll down and click on Show advanced settings. This will reveal all the hidden options for Chrome.
  • Scroll down till you see the Plug-ins heading. Here, select Click to play radio button.
  • Click on Done on the lower-right corner of the box.

After doing this, you’ll see that whenever any website has an auto-playing video content on its page, you’ll see a jigsaw icon with a gray background. To play that video, you can right-click on the jigsaw icon and select “Run this time” option.

Disable Auto-playing videos on Firefox

I have already made a tutorial to disable auto-playing videos on Firefox, so check that out.

 

Disable Auto-playing videos on Opera

Opera doesn’t natively support stopping of auto-playing videos on its own. You can install an extension called as Disabled HTML5 Autoplay from Opera add-ons store. It restricts the videos using media control to stop any video from playing automatically.

Disable Auto-playing videos on Internet Explorer and Edge

Unfortunately, there is currently no way to disable HTML5 auto-playing videos on both IE and Edge. If you are annoyed by these videos, try switching to either Chrome or Firefox which are both excellent alternatives. I’ll update the article if Microsoft updates edge or IE in the future.

After performing these steps for your preferred web browser, you won’t face any auto-playing videos on the web. Mind you, these methods aren’t perfect and some scammy websites will find ways to counter these measures by voodoo magic.

The best approach here is to find alternatives to those websites because those websites aren’t very trustworthy in the first place.

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Written by Utkarsh

Utkarsh Bhatt is a certified tech expert and software engineer for a Fortune 500 Company. He was born in 1995, making him one of the oldest members of the team at EFX. Utkarsh loves solving technical issues and is always the first to jump on any problem that needs solving. When he’s not coding or debugging, he enjoys playing video games (especially Super Smash Bros.) and watching cartoons.

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1 thought on “Disable Auto-playing Videos on Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera and Internet Explorer”

  1. Scroll down till you see the Plug-ins heading. Here, select Click to play radio button. ……….. this does not appear!

    Reply

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