You may have noticed when you visit a website that a video or audio is playing in the background.
Almost all browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge have the autoplay setting enabled by default.
But if you get annoyed by videos that start playing whenever you open a webpage, you can easily stop your browser from auto-playing videos on websites.
In this article, we will walk you through the steps required to turn off video autoplay in web browsers.
Edge
Click the three-dotted Menu button in the toolbar
Choose “Settings”
In the left sidebar, go to “Cookies & Site Permissions”
Look for the “Media Autoplay” section, switch to the “Limit” option.
Note: This is not a kill switch for all videos, but instead the browser will limit autoplay videos in the future based on your past interactions with autoplaying media on a given site.
Firefox
Firefox has a really good feature that allows you to block autoplay videos on all websites (and you can whitelist some sites if you choose to).
Click the three-lined Menu button in the toolbar
Go to “Settings.”
Go to the “Privacy & Security” section
Click the “Settings” button next to the “Autoplay” option.
From the popup, click the drop-down next to the “Default for all websites” option, and switch to “Block audio and video.”
Safari
Safari is really good about blocking autoplay videos (and about privacy features in general). In fact, it blocks autoplay videos by default, so you don’t need to do anything at all.
If for some reason the feature is disabled for you, reenable it by:
Open Safari
Click Safari from the menu bar and click Preferences
Switch to the Websites tab
Choose Auto-Play in the sidebar.
In the bottom-right drop-down, choose the Never Auto-Play option.
Chrome
Chrome no longer has settings to block video ads or stop autoplay, but you can mute every webpage then enable audio for the ones you use regularly. For many users, this is enough.
Go to Settings
Select Security and Privacy
Go to Site Settings
Look for Content and click Additional Content Settings
Click Sound, click the button to "Don't allow sites to play sound"
You may click the "Add" button to add sites that you will allow to autoplay sound so Chrome won't block it.