Living on the (New) Edge: Media Auto-Play
- Paul Thurrott
- Apr 09, 2019
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13
Classic Edge allows users to block all web-based automatically playing media. This isn’t possible with the new Edge, at least not yet. But there is at least a workaround, and it appears that Microsoft will more fully address this issue in the future.
If you’re familiar with classic Edge, you know that you can control whether websites can auto-play audio or video globally via the browser’s settings interface (Settings and more > Settings > Advanced > Media autoplay). This is useful on annoying sites like ZDNet and CNET that trigger video playback with audio on their article pages.
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This option is not available in the new Edge, at least not yet. But because it is based on Chromium, the new Edge supports the same content-blocking functionality as does Google Chrome. And that means that you can prevent sites from playing audio on a site-by-site basis. This won’t stop auto-play videos from playing. But it will prevent that annoying blast of audio.
To do this, navigate to a website that auto-plays video. Then, click the Site information box at the left of the address bar.
Select Sound and then Mute. This will disable auto-play audio and the audio in auto-play videos across that site.
I’ll be writing more about the edge://flags interface soon, but autoplay does make an appearance there.
From what I can tell, however, it doesn’t yet work. There’s also an empty Settings page at edge://settings/content/sound that may eventually turn into something. Together, these interfaces suggest to me that Microsoft plans to duplicate the media auto-play configuration capabilities in classic Edge at some point. And that will be a happy day, indeed.
Conversation 13 comments
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dontbe evil
<p>waiting for people (that never used Edge), that now will complain about this in 3..2..1..</p>
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Todd Northrop
<p>Really impressed with the initial beta release. Obviously some things are missing, but I could easily use this as my every day browser. Finally, Edge favorites and menus can be properly used with a mouse.</p>
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Stooks
<p>Safari is hands down the best at blocking auto play of any media. Also it has an option to block cross site tracking as well. </p><p><br></p><p>Google will NEVER give you these features in their version of Chromium. Hopefully Microsoft will.</p>