What is your workaround to avoid videos auto playing on websites?
I use Safari with Adguard and Chrome with Ublock on macOS and Chrome on Android with AdAway root version, and they work pretty fine for blocking ads, but these videos especially in news sites always autoplay and annoy me a bit, I think they have the same effect as the ads in annoyance level for me.
Do you know of some extensions or workarounds to get rid of them for good?
Because science has demonstrated that autistic people are more highly distracted by motion, there is now a header you can send when requesting a site which basically says “no animation please” and you get a more static interface.
I’m just kidding. Can you imagine if that were the case? That would be incredible.
It’s true by the way: autistic people are more distracted by motion than non-autistics.
Interface elements that move in response to user interaction aren’t so bad. But things that just move for the hell of it make websites un-usable for me.
What I do in those cases where they don’t provide a pause button is I just delete the elements using dev tools in my browser. Any carousel you can’t pause. Any sparkly stars. Any animated backgrounds. Must be deleted before I can proceed.
Strange. Chrome based browsers do not allow autoplay in most cases. If the site specifically default mutes the video then autoplay is allowed. I believe Firefox adheres to this as well. I don’t know anything about Safari.
Will not autoplay: <video controls autoplay>
Will autoplay: <video controls autoplay muted>
If the sites you visit autoplay unmuted videos, they are circumventing html somehow. So this means you can probably use uBlock (or ABP) and its element picker to remove the element/video, but that’s also annoying if since you won’t ever see the videos, and something you do want to watch comes up.
In safari, I can’t recommend the fizzy water bundle enough (extension) or at least baking soda (which comes in the bundle). The extensions are super cheap and are well worth it imo but one of the features of baking soda is to stop videos from auto playing
I love having firefox on my phone with ublock origin and DarkReader.
Facebook Container is also a nice addon that suppresses facebook trackers specifically, that are often embedded on all sites where there is some “log in/share/comment with facebook” element
Ublock Origin has a few ways to do what you want. The most straightforward way is to click on the extension icon, click open dashboard, go to filter lists, scroll to annoyances, and try to enable some or all of those.
Ublock Origin also has a “nuclear” option called disabling JavaScript (extension icon -> JavaScript and reload), which happens to break video playback on just about every modern website :) .
You could switch to Firefox for Android, which has support for a limited number of Firefox extensions including Ublock Origin, with all of the desktop functionality.
If you really want to stick with a chromium based browser for some reason, you could try kiwi browser (chromium based browser for Android with chrome extension support) combined with Ublock Origin.
The internet is surprisingly made more usable in a lot of cases when you disable JavaScript. I use Noscript along with Unblock simply because there are less clicks involved to “green light” which cdns/scripts you want to allow through.
This along with a few other niceties like invidious, yt-dlp, sponsorblock, and the duckduckgo lite search engine have made it so I don’t feel distracted, overwhelmed, nor frustrated navigating the web anymore.
uBlock also has the "eyedropper" (idk its proper name) that you can use to pick css blocks on the page and preview what it looks like with that block removed. If you find the block for the content you want to remove, you can save it so that future instances of that block just won't load in the first place. Works great for embedded chats and those annoying mid-article newsletter sign up flyovers.
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