One of the most irritating things that I have to face when surfing news and sports based websites is that embedded videos start playing automatically even if you are not interested in them. These sites often embed small videos on the side and you notice them only when they start playing. These videos may or may not be related to the webpage content. And some of the sites are designed that a new video starts playing as soon as one video ends. So far I had no control over these videos, so I had to resolve to muting them, stopping them or skipping them to the end. But using the FlashStopper add-on for Firefox, you can prevent these videos from automatically playing and they can be played only when you choose to watch them.
The FlashStopper add-on for Firefox is a lifesaver for those who visit news, sports or video websites everyday and do not want the videos to be played automatically. It is an install-and-forget type of add-on. You do not have to do pretty much anything after the installation. It displays an icon in the Firefox toolbar and prevents auto-playing of embedded videos. It supports websites like Dailymotion, NFL, BBC, Yahoo!, MSN, Bing and more.
It replaces the video area with its thumbnail and a play button on top of it. You can choose to click/tap the play button to watch the video. It gives you full control over embedded videos and if you want to re-enable automatic playing of videos, then you can right-click on the FlashStopper icon in the toolbar and disable it.
You can also manage different websites and give them exceptions from the FlashStopper rules – either completely disable FlashStopper on these sites or always enable it on them. It also has a proactive video blocking feature which uses some aggressive techniques to block the auto-playing of videos and should be used only when regular methods are failing.
Conclusion: FlashStopper gives relief from the automatic playback of videos on video streaming, news or sports websites by preventing them from auto-playing. But it does not completely block the videos, you can still play them by clicking on the video thumbnail.
You can get FlashStopper for Firefox from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/flashstopper/.