While that’s all well and good, you may want to stop videos from playing automatically in the first place as it wastes bandwidth on mobile. We have covered how to avoid it with third-party extensions and tweaking browser settings – but those options have been hit or miss for years. So, here is how to tackle the autoplay problem once and for all with Chrome on your mobile device and the desktop.
Disable Autoplay Videos in Chrome on Android
Android makes disabling autoplay videos simple. First, launch Chrome on your phone or tablet and go to Settings > Site Settings.
Next, scroll down the menu and tap on Media, and then Autoplay and toggle the switch off.
Disable Autoplay Videos in Chrome on Desktop
As Chrome development continues, the company has said it will eventually include some options that make it easy to stop autoplay videos on sites as it does with muting them. Until then, you can still get the same results by digging into it a bit. Launch Chrome and in the Address Bar type: chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy and hit Enter. That will bring you directly to the flag that you need to change. From the drop-down box, change the setting from Default to “Document user activation is required” and relaunch the browser.
Now, while an autoplay video might pop up on a site, it will not play automatically, and you will have to specifically click or tap on it if you want it to play. Using this, in addition to the muting option, will save you a lot of frustrations while browsing the web in Chrome. Do you find sites that autoplay videos annoying? Leave a comment below and let us know your thoughts. Or for more tech discussion, join our gP Forums for more troubleshooting help and advice. I’ll look into just going back to firefox (uggh).. and (sigh) abandoning gmail. Google seems to be evolving into a champion of user abuse. I’m tired of going over my monthly bandwidth allowance be stupid autoplay videos have eaten up 25% or more of my monthly bandwidth FOR NOTHING OF VALUE
- I tried this chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy on Yahoo solution, yet the videos still play automatically.
- So I also tried disabling JavaScript for the entire yahoo.com domain, but still the same.
- So I also switched to “Yahoo Mail Basic” in Yahoo Mail Settings. Now, the ads appear to be plain image ads. Hopefully, those video ads won’t come back.
