YouTube is no longer alone in serving video-sharing for internet users. Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms have their own video service to combat YouTube.
Nearly all social media platforms are now offer an automatic-play feature over the videos. Which mean, we don’t have to press any button to play the video. They will automatically play their self once loaded. At a glance, the feature looks great and useful, but — honestly — not always.
The automatic-play feature of video is annoying when we don’t expect the video. For instance, when searching for something in Google, you may stumbled in a specific site that contains a video add. Of course, in this case you don’t want the video to play as they will bother you and can cause your browser to run slowly and.
This article will show you how to stop video from playing automatically in Google Chrome and Firefox
1. Google Chrome
By default, Google Chrome doesn’t include any built-in feature to enable us prevent the videos from playing automatically. However, we can expect the additional Chrome extension to do this. In this case, we are going to use an extension called Disable HTML5 Autoplay. The extension works well on Google Chrome 52.0.xxx
- As usual, go to the three-dots icon on the top-right corner and choose More tools –> Extensions.
- Scroll down to the “Get more extensions” link to go to the Chrome web store and type “Disable HTML5 Autoplay” on the search field. Press the ADD TO CHROME button to add the extension. Once the extension is installed, you will have a new icon next to the three-dots icon on the top-right corner. Just press the icon to enable/disable the extension
2. Firefox
Unlike Google Chrome, Firefox comes with an advanced setting to allow us disabling the automatic-play feature
- Type “about:config” on the Firefox address bar and confirm the prompt
- Type “autoplay” on the search field. Double click the “media.autoplay.embed” option to change the value from true to false