Spending time on your Facebook News Feed is always dangerous. Doing so now that Facebook auto-plays videos with sound makes browsing at work about as safe as clicking on the link in an email chain from your 67-year-old aunt.
However, for every evil engineer who forces autoplay down your throat, there’s another unpaid developer out there with a Chrome extension.
Enter Disable HTML5 Autoplay, a Chrome extension that does…well, you can probably guess what it does. The extension is a free download from the Chrome extension store (also available on Opera, if you’re into that), and it will stop any HTML5 video from autoplaying.
It works on Facebook, YouTube, and most other online videos. Just like AdBlock, there’s a little toggle in the top-right of Chrome that lets you turn Autoplay back on for extended YouTube browsing sessions.
In practice, it’s better than the other extensions out there that just remove the video component entirely. This extension loads the video, but just doesn’t start playing it, which is perfect if you’re the kind of browser who opens new tabs for pages to load in the background, but don’t want the video to start playing before you click in.
