Stopping auto-play videos


This has been making the rounds today and is pretty cool tip:

Kirk McElhearn:

But you can stop auto-play videos from playing on a Mac. If you use Chrome or Firefox, it's pretty simple, and the plugins below work both on macOS and Windows; if you use Safari, it's a bit more complex, but it's not that hard.

It's actually pretty easy on Safari. Essentially you activate the Debug menu via the command line and select a menu option to disallow in-line videos. This works great and I think the preferred method over a plug-in. It seems to work well at stopping videos from playing when a page is loaded. You can view the video by actually pressing the play controller.

I think it's one thing if you click a page to view a video, but lately it seems auto-playing videos are everywhere. And often the videos are unrelated to the content.

I used to run a Flash controller plugin that let me control what elements played by clicking on them. More stuff moved to HTML5, however, and I stopped using Flash all together. This is a good solution to take back control of the browser window.