Surfing the web currently comes with several annoyances when it comes to accessing the content. If it is not that we have to accept 67 alerts of use of cookies per day, we have to worry about crawling our habits, invasive advertising, the insistence of some webs on notifications, and those that may be the worst of all : sites that automatically play audio or video.

While in some cases these things are not unbearable and sometimes we can even deal with them without thinking much, it also happens that there are pages that abuse a little of what they can do. So, if you want to prevent the automatic reproduction of multimedia content in your browser, we tell you how to do it.

Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi

In Google Chrome or any browser that supports your extensions, such as Opera or Vilvaldi, you can simply use the Diasable HTML5 Autoplay plugin to completely stop automatic playback of content on any web. It’s that simple, you do not need to set anything up. Now, this does not mean that the playback will be completely disabled, only it will not be automatic and you can control it.

Another extension that can be useful also, Smart Tab Mute. What it does is basically improve the eyelashes feature in Chrome, that is, it ensures that only one tab plays sound at a time. No listening to the audio of two YouTube videos you have open at the same time.

If you want something even more powerful, you can use MuteTab, an extension that offers sound management for Chrome and lets you do things like block specific websites to prevent them from playing sound in the background .

Firefox

In Firefox you do not need extensions to prevent the automatic reproduction of multimedia content. You can change a setting in your browser settings and you will be free of the hassle. All you have to do is type about:config in the address bar and search for the media.autoplay function . Double-click on the preference to change the value to “false” and that’s it.

If you are interested in being able to prevent only one tab playing sound at the same time, Firefox has a Smart Mute Tab- based plug-in that lets you do just that.

Safari and Edge

Safari and Edge are another story. While in the first you can use the security options of OS X to disable Internet plugins and prevent automatic playback of content, this does not work in the latest versions, or in all kinds of formats.

Microsoft Edge does not even have a similar option, nor is there any extension that offers a solution. So if you want to avoid this annoyance in your browser, Microsoft and Apple browsers will not make it easy.