As you might have heard, Facebook recently announced their plans to make changes to how videos are played on its platform. The company has decided that by default, videos will soon start to play automatically with the sound on. Apparently this has been well-received as Facebook claims to have gotten “positive feedback” from it.
However if you’re in the camp that thinks that this is a silly and annoying feature, you’ll be pleased to learn that there is now a Google Chrome extension that will prevent Facebook videos from autoplaying. This extension called “Disable HTML5 Autoplay” will be available for both Chrome and Opera, with plans to eventually make it available for Firefox as well.
This extension will not block the videos but rather stops them from playing automatically, so if you wanted you could still play them by clicking on them. Do note that Facebook will give users the option of disabling the feature if they choose to, but this extension will work with not just Facebook videos, but all HTML5 videos in general so if you do visit websites that love to autoplay videos upon loading, then this feature could come in handy.
The extension is also customizable where you whitelist and blacklist sites that you want videos to autoplay or to not autoplay. You’ll be able to get your hands on the extension via the Chrome Web Store or the Opera Add-Ons page.