Do you hate auto-playing videos in your browser? Here’s how to stop them.

Posted by cci34900 on Jun 21, 2016 in Blog, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Do you hate auto-playing videos in your browser? Here’s how to stop them.

When you visit a website you want to view that sites content and not listen to a video that plays automatically. An auto-playing video on any site can be very annoying. If you are at work or any place where you need to be quite or not disturb others and the video starts the sound can be distracting.

The newest browser by Microsoft called Edge (in Windows 10) has an option to turn off Adobe Flash. The bad news is that it doesn’t work; at least not for most videos. The future version of Edge is supposed to have ad-blocking support built in and should help with killing auto-playing videos. To find the feature you click on the menu icon, and choose Settings, View advanced settings and then turn the setting “Use Adobe Flash Player” to off.

Here are the steps you need to disable auto-play videos in Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer.

Chrome:

In the upper-right corner there is a three-line menu icon you need to click on that and select Settings.

At the bottom of the settings page there is a link “Show advanced settings…” that you need to click on.

Find the Privacy section and click the “Content settings” button you’ll find just below the word Privacy.

Next scroll down to the “Plugins” section and select “Let me choose when to run plugin content”.

Next you’ll click the “Manage individual plugins” link.

On the “Plugins” page that opens you’ll find Adobe Flash Player and uncheck “Always allowed to run”.

Now next time you happen to encounter an auto-playing Flash video you should get a gray box with a jigsaw puzzle piece icon in it. If you do want to play the video you can right-click on the puzzle piece icon and select “Run this plugin”.

Firefox:

Press Ctrl-L to take you to the address bar and type in the URL bar “about:addons” (without the quotes).

On the left menu you’ll find an icon that looks like a Lego block called “Plugins” and you need to click on it.

Find the “Shockwave Flash” plugin amongst the listed plugins.

Click the “Always Activate” button on the right to bring up a menu of 3 choices and select “Ask to Activate”.

Now whenever you visit a page that has an embedded Flash video on it the video window will appear as a box that is white and has Adobe’s Flash logo (a stylized letter ‘f’) in the center. Also a gray bar will be at the top of the page giving you the options to continue blocking or allow the flash.

If you choose “Allow” you’ll get the choices to “Allow Now” or “Allow and Remember”.

Internet Explorer:

From the menus at the top of the window, select Tools then Manage add-ons. If there is no menu at top of window you can hit the Alt key and T key at the same time to bring up the correct menu.

Choose “Manage Add-ons” and on the left will be “Toolbars and Extensions”. Make sure it is selected and then wait for the list to appear.

Find and double-click on the “Shockwave Flash Object” on the right, it will be listed under Adobe and be near or at the top.

From the “More Information” box you click the “Remove all sites button”. Now you can close the dialog box.

Now when you visit a site the Flash windows may not appear at all, or they may appear blank.

A bar should be at the bottom of the browser window and offer options to allow Flash to play. Click the x on the right to and say “No.”

At the time of this writing these methods have been tested and working but as all the above listed browser are constantly being updated the methods outlined could stop working at any time.