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Comment by gavinsyancey | Hacker News Reader

Firefox blocks auto playing videos with sound by default. And you can also configure it to block all autoplay or or allow it globally, or per-website. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/block-autoplay

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https://wiki.mozilla.org/Media/block-autoplay has some more additional information in particular about the media.autoplay.blocking_policy pref which allows restoring the older behavior of the play intent not being sticky.

Which is great for most stuff, but doesn't seem to stop facebook 'reels' from animating. They must do some trickery like loading a short animated image as a 'teaser' before rendering the actual video on click.

Using this since I can remember. But noticed another issue and still searching how to disable the video cache at all until I start to play the video and to limit it to 2-5 seconds (or 1 MB) during playing, though no chance so far.

And just another issue since few months: youtube page auto-reloads/replaces itself since few seconds after opening (even if the tab is not active). The title gets replaced from the original language into English auto-translation (EN is default for browser), but I'd like to see video titles in the original language.

For youtube there is a "YouTube no Buffer"[0] extension that does precisely this - stops videos from autoplaying and buffering when you open a link.

I have this plugin, Leechblock and ublock filters (blocking any mention of shorts from the site) to make yt less addicting. And it kinda works.

0 - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-no-bu...

The Brave browser also has a setting in “Privacy and Security” -> “Site and shields settings” -> “Additional permissions” -> “Autoplay”

You can block globally or per website.

Doesn’t YouTube technically autoplay? You click a link, change page and url and a video starts playing

I can't try it at the moment, but I'm not sure the page is actually reloaded. I suspect YouTube is an SPA and, when you click, the url change event is captured by a router and the content of the page is merely replaced.

Video autoplay is usually allowed on a whitelist of URLs determined by the browser vendor, if I recall correctly.

YouTube is always on those whitelists.

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