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Disable Autoplay AND Buffering of HTML5 Videos

  • 4 replies
  • 2 have this problem
  • 3 views
  • Last reply by Kyle123

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I'm aware autoplay can be disabled via changing the media.autoplay.enabled setting within about:config however I'm hoping to find a way to prevent HTML5 videos from buffering unless I ask Firefox to play the video. I'm on a slow and limited bandwidth plan and want to stop websites playing video content.

There are a few addons out there, but all the ones I found are not compatible with my version of Firefox and it'd be nice if Firefox could natively support it.

I'm aware autoplay can be disabled via changing the media.autoplay.enabled setting within about:config however I'm hoping to find a way to prevent HTML5 videos from buffering unless I ask Firefox to play the video. I'm on a slow and limited bandwidth plan and want to stop websites playing video content. There are a few addons out there, but all the ones I found are not compatible with my version of Firefox and it'd be nice if Firefox could natively support it.

All Replies (4)

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example site of the problem so others can find a solution?

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WestEnd said

example site of the problem so others can find a solution?

Any video that uses HTML5. Example? Any Youtube video. You'll notice when you open up a youtube video, it will begin buffering and autoplays the video.

The setting: media.autoplay.enabled will prevent videos from automatically playing, but the video still buffers. This means internet bandwidth is being consumed to load the video's content.

I ideally want to prevent any video, like Youtube, from loading until I actually ask it to play.

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There isn't a built-in feature for this. Add-ons can block various kinds of content from loading in the first place, which probably is the most logical approach, but I don't know of a good one targeted to this specific issue.

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The trouble is I couldn't find any addins which work with current versions of Firefox. Is there a "suggestions" page so I could ask for the feature to be implemented?

Edit: I imagine such a feature could prevent video ads from loading and playing on pages. This could provide some big speed improvements to other users. This feature would be great!

Modified by Kyle123