Are you bothered with autoplay videos or video ads on websites? They start playing automatically without user permissions, they are almost everywhere and that is really annoying. In this quick guide, we will show you two easy and effective ways to block these autoplaying videos from websites you are visiting using Mozilla Firefox on a Windows 10 PC.
Disable HTML5 video autoplay in Firefox
HTML5 video is trending. More and more websites now use HTML5 videos other than traditional Flash videos. It is cross-platform, does not require any browser plugin or addons, and much easier to setup. You can follow these steps to add HTML5 videos to your websites. Firefox is capable of preventing HTML5 videos from playing automatically. To do that, open Firefox browser on your PC, type about:config into your browser address bar, press Enter, just like you visit a normal website or URL. You will then get a warning message as below.
This might void your warranty!
Changing these advanced settings can be harmful to the stability, security, and performance of this application. You should only continue if you are sure of what you are doing.
Click ‘I accept the risk!’ button to confirm and continue. After that a long list of all kinds of advanced settings and options shows up. Above this list, there is a search box. Search for ‘media.autoplay’ or just ‘autoplay’, you will find the ‘media.autoplay.enabled‘ entry. By default its value is set to true. Double click on it to disable the media autoplay settings in Firefox.
To confirm it, open any website or page with HTML5 video that is set to play automatically, this time the video should not play automatically like before.
Stop Flash video autoplay in Firefox
The above method helps disable the autoplay of HTML videos, it however will not affect those Flash videos. To turn off Flash video autoplay in Firefox browser, you can go to change the plugin settings. Open Firefox on your computer, click Menu button at the top right section, then choose Add-ons from the drop down menu. Alternatively you can simply type about:addons into your browser address bar and visit it to open your browser Add-ons page. Besides the Shockwave Flash plugin, you should see the Options button and a drop-down menu. Click the drop-down menu to change it from ‘Always Activate’ to ‘Ask to Activate‘ option so Flash videos are not play automatically, you can manually click to play Flash videos, or choose ‘Never Activate‘ if you like to totally ban all flash videos. The Never Activate option is to disable Flash player or plugin so no Flash videos can be played in your browser.
