Turning off autoplay does not stop videos from auto-starting, will this be fixed, or should I switch to another browser ? (which do you suggest?)
Hi,
Firefox these days has an annoying habit of starting videos on every news page that I open and when I scroll through my facebook newsfeed. There is only a very select amount of these videos that I would actually want to watch, and it's annoying to be bombarder with this media constantly.
I have tried disabling auto-play in the config page to no avail, and am not interested in installing add-ons to accomplish a task that should be handled by the browser itself.
So, does anyone know of a method to accomplish this with FireFox's own settings, or alternatively recommend a browser that does not have this offensive behavior ?
Thanks in advance...
Réiteach roghnaithe
I think the built-in setting (media.autoplay.enabled) relates to the HTML5 player and doesn't apply to plugins such as the Flash player. You usually can tell whether it's a plugin-based player by right-clicking it and checking whether it has a proprietary context menu instead of the normal Firefox menu.
To control when plugins start, you can use the "Ask to Activate" permission setting. You can adjust this setting on the Add-ons page. Either:
- Command+Shift+a (Windows: Ctrl+Shift+a)
- "3-bar" menu button (or Tools menu) > Add-ons
In the left column, click Plugins. Then on the right side, change the permission for Shockwave Flash (for example) from Always Activate to Ask to Activate. (If you have plugins that run in the background or globally, such as security plugins, you may encounter problems using Ask to Activate for those.)
Of course, once you give permission to a site, each new page you load from that site will be able to auto-start its videos. Taking detailed control of that does require an add-on. I think this one might be the best integrated with the standard permission feature:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/click-to-play-per-element/
Read this answer in context 👍 8All Replies (2)
Réiteach Roghnaithe
I think the built-in setting (media.autoplay.enabled) relates to the HTML5 player and doesn't apply to plugins such as the Flash player. You usually can tell whether it's a plugin-based player by right-clicking it and checking whether it has a proprietary context menu instead of the normal Firefox menu.
To control when plugins start, you can use the "Ask to Activate" permission setting. You can adjust this setting on the Add-ons page. Either:
- Command+Shift+a (Windows: Ctrl+Shift+a)
- "3-bar" menu button (or Tools menu) > Add-ons
In the left column, click Plugins. Then on the right side, change the permission for Shockwave Flash (for example) from Always Activate to Ask to Activate. (If you have plugins that run in the background or globally, such as security plugins, you may encounter problems using Ask to Activate for those.)
Of course, once you give permission to a site, each new page you load from that site will be able to auto-start its videos. Taking detailed control of that does require an add-on. I think this one might be the best integrated with the standard permission feature:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/click-to-play-per-element/
Athraithe ag jscher2000 - Support Volunteer ar
Great - Thanks!
Followed your suggestion: And playing of videos have come to a halt!
Oddly enough even the HTML5 videos have ceased auto-execution as well, despite having turned this off a couple of weeks back.
There was a Firefox update today - Perhaps that helped ...