Videos that auto-play when you first up a website are the worst. Worse than accidentally squirting lemon juice in your eye, stepping on a Lego piece in the middle of the night, or even watching the US Presidential debates. (Although I guess you could technically get even more evil by having a website that auto-plays this most recent Presidential debate when it loads, but hey, you get my point.)
Today, some arbitrary website I had to browse to for work was the straw that broke the camel’s back when the website started auto-playing a 20 minute long infomercial in the sidebar, and I decided I absolutely needed to figure out how to tweak Chrome so I could prevent auto-play videos while browsing the web.
I found it more than a little ironic when PC World’s article on how to stop auto-play videos had an aggravating auto-play video of its own in the sidebar:
Even more aggravating? the PCWorld’s instructions don’t even work for their own auto-play videos, since the instructions are only applicable to Flash content and not HTML5!
In the end, I found a few more useful articles, including this one that instructs how to disable auto-play Flash content and then provides a helpful link to a Chrome extension called Disable HTML5 Autoplay to take care of the HTML5 side of things. So far, so good – it even restrained the PCWorld video from starting up when I reloaded their page!
RossRuns 
Wow … this might even make me consider installing Chrome!
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I think Firefox has a similar plugin / solution. I think the only oddball that doesn’t let you block videos is Microsoft’s baby (probably because they rely on crap like that to market their new product lines!)
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Lemon juice is actually good for your eyes (kidding, although in my new-age phase I remember concocting an eyewash with grapefruit juice). Do you ever wonder if these CEOs visit their own websites? If I were a CEO and spot-checked mine, then was greeted with a loud, blaring video that could potentially freeze someone’s computer, I’d be itching to fire someone.
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Eyewash with grapefruit juice? I’d rather go swimming in the ocean with a thousand papercuts.
I agree, if you orI were CEO, we’d probably be more about the user-experience than the bottom line. Which of course would mean we wouldn’t be CEO for long, if the Board of Directors had anything to say about it!
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It’s like the old porn popups only a little different.
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I’m sure Ross will join me in saying we have no idea what these porn popups you speak of are …
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Yes, I know not of what you speak of. Porn popups? I could hazard a guess, given the context, but I’m sure this is a relatively PG-13 blog and talking about things popping up due to porn is getting a little bit on the rated R side of things… 😉
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