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YouTube is a bit smarter these days: they defer playback until the tab first gets focus. So you have to pause at most as many videos as there are separate windows, not tabs.

I believe Chrome is not nearly as smart as it could be about deferring loading of tabs, though.

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It's not youtube doing that, but chrome. The html5 video element doesn't start playback until the tab first gets focus.

Firefox has the same thing, but you have to enable it in about:config

Do you have to enable it? I use Firefox Nightly, and have been observing this behavior for a long, long time. It's one of those things that's so minor and yet so important that I wonder how I went without it for so long.

I believe it is enabled by default now, and the value in about:config is `media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground`

Thanks for the pref name. The feature is currently enabled by default only in the Firefox Nightly channel but you can use the pref to enable it in the Beta or Release channels.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1352014

It's disabled by default on regular firefox.

I prefer to disable media.autoplay.enabled which is enabled by default.

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