Microsoft Edge Chromium has a lot of useful features. One of these useful features is to stop websites from playing the videos automatically. You might have visited some websites that have embedded media content on every page. When you visit a page on such websites, the media content embedded on that page starts playing automatically. This can be irritating for some users. Fortunately, you can disable video autoplay in Microsoft Edge for such websites. This article shows how to stop videos from auto-playing in the Microsoft Edge browser.
Stop web pages from Autoplaying Videos in Edge
Microsoft Windows 11/10 has added options that let you allow or disable video autoplay in Microsoft Edge. You can stop them from playing on all websites you open on Microsoft Edge, or you can allow/stop them from playing on some websites of your choice.
Disable video autoplay feature in Microsoft Edge browser
The following instructions will guide you on how to disable video autoplay in Microsoft Edge browser on your Windows 11/10 computer.
- Open Microsoft Edge Settings
- Go to Site Permissions
- Select Media autoplay
- Control audio or video autoplay.
Video autoplay in Edge especially gets annoying with the new MSN pages that get linked to from the new tab page, when it supports an auto-playing video.
Let’s see all these instructions.
1] Open Edge Settings
Launch the Edge browser. Go to the ‘Settings and more’ option (visible as 3 horizontal dots) and select ‘Settings’ from the list of options displayed there. Edge Settings will open in a new tab. Additionally, you can also open Edge Settings by typing the following URL in a new tab page:
edge://settings
2] Go to Site Permissions and select Media autoplay
Under the ‘Settings’ panel to the left, select the ‘Cookies and site permissions’ category. Scroll down and locate the ‘Media autoplay‘ option. Once you find it, click on it.
3] Control audio or video autoplay
If Microsoft Edge is playing videos on websites automatically, the Media autoplay option is set to Allow in your system. You can change this setting. You can also control if audio and video should automatically play on sites. For this, select the drop-down menu adjacent to the settings and select the ‘Limit’ option.
When you select the LImit option, Media will play depending on how you’ve visited the page and whether you interacted with media in the past. Refresh the page to see changes to this setting.
You can also block websites to play videos automatically. For this, select the Block option. Once done, changes will be applied to new tabs and some websites on the Internet will be configured to disable video autoplay in Microsoft Edge.
If you do not see the Blck option under the Media autoplay setting in Edge, that setting might be disabled. You can check and configure this in Edge Flags.
Open a new tab in Microsoft Edge and go to the following URL:
edge://flags
Once, the Edge flags page is loaded, type “Show block option in autoplay settings” in its search bar. Click on the drop-down and select Enabled to enable this flag in Edge. These changes will not save automatically. You have to restart Edge. If you do not receive the message to restart Edge, close Edge and reopen it.
Now, open Edge Settings and go to “Cookies and site permissions > Media autoplay.” Click on the drop-down and you will see the Block option there.
Allow some websites to play media automatically
After disabling this feature in Edge, if you want some websites to play the media content automatically, you can do so by adding them as an exception. To do so, open Edge Settings and go to Cookies and site permissions > Media autoplay. Now, click on the Add button and add the website address. Click OK.
Do note that after disabling this feature in Edge, some websites may continue to playback videos automatically. These websites are configured to override the default settings of browsers. This occurs on all mainstream browsers!
How do I change my Edge settings?
You can change your Edge Settings by opening the Settings page. Click on the three dots on the top right side and select Settings. Now, select the category from the left side to change a particular setting in Edge.
How do I reset Edge to default settings?
Sometimes when Edge does not work as expected or you start facing issues with Edge, you can reset its settings to the default. To do so, open Edge Settings and select the Reset settings category from the left side. Now, select the Restore settings to their default values option on the right side. This action will reset the startup page, new tab page, pinned tabs, and search engine in Edge. Your favorites will not be cleared.
Read: Stop Videos from playing automatically on websites in Chrome or Firefox.
The above explains how to disable video autoplay in Microsoft Edge.
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