Advertisements for websites are important and vital for their administrators and authors to continue providing free content for visitors. Sometimes, however, on some sites, advertisements (which should never be blocked) are made from videos that have the major defect of starting automatically on their own, in some cases even with active audio .
If you often visit sites with videos that start immediately on their own, you can block their automatic playback by changing a simple setting in the browser.
Let's see how to disable the automatic start of videos on the internet, including HTML5 videos that do not use Flash.
To disable the automatic start of videos in Google Chrom and you must disable the Autoplay option.
Then go to the main menu by pressing the button with three horizontal lines in the upper right corner, open the Settings, scroll down, go to the " advanced settings ... " and, under Privacy, press the " Content settings " button .
On the next screen, scroll down until you find the " plug-in " section and change the option by putting one of "only the important ones" or "let me choose".
From now on, every time you open a site with a flash animation or a streaming video, you will need to click on it to see it.
For some sites with HTML5 video this option may not be enough.
You must therefore install an extension like Disable HTML5 Autoplay, to disable the autoplay of the videos on each site.
READ ALSO: Block pop-ups from websites on Chrome and Firefox
To disable the Autoplay of videos in Firefox the speech is similar to that made with Chrome.
In Firefox, however, you need to go to the add-ons page from the main menu or by opening a new tab at about: addons .
From the Plugins section, locate the one called Shockwave Flash and, from the drop-down menu next to it, change the option from " Always activate " to " Ask before activating ".
The automatic start function of the videos on the sites visited with Firefox is now disabled and, instead of the video, a button will appear to start it, if you want.
For the automatic playback of videos in HTML5, with Firefox, no extension is needed, you just need to change an internal parameter.
Then open a new tab with the address about: config, go ahead by pressing OK and then search for the autoplay parameter.
You will then find an option called media.autoplay.enabled which you will need to change, with a double click, to false .
Finally, with Internet Explorer, there is a really simple way to prevent streaming videos from automatically starting on every website.
You just have to go to the main menu by pressing on the wheel at the top right, move the mouse on Security and then activate the ActiveX Filtering option.
With this option enabled, any ActiveX control (i.e. every plugin or external component of the websites) will be blocked and can only be run manually on the trusted sites.
Again, the button to start them will appear on the videos.
For HTML5 videos, on Internet Explorer and Safari there is no way to stop autoplay.
