When some newsworthy events occur in the world and you want to find about it, you usually end up on a news website that starts to play videos automatically. Crazy thing is that these videos that start playing as soon you open that website, are not even related to the news, they are advertisement, live streaming of news TV channels or about something else.
Fortunately, this problem is well known and now the leading web browsers have started to give options to block the automatic playing of such unnecessary and obtrusive videos. We have posted about how Firefox web browser can be configured to block automatic media playback. And now Microsoft’s new Edge web browser also has a similar feature. Here is how you can change its settings in the Edge browser to stop the automatic playing of the media files in all websites:
- Launch Edge web browser and click on the menu icon (three dots) near the top-right corner of the window.
- From the menu that is displayed, select Settings to see the menu containing all the settings.
- Select Advanced from the settings screen.
- Under the options for Media Autoplay, you can choose Allow, Limit or Block. If you select Allow, then Edge browser will not block the automatic playing of any media. If you select Limit, then it will now allow automatic playback of media when the tabs are not in foreground. And if you select Block, it will block all media playback until you manually click on the play button.
Compared to Firefox web browser, Edge does not offer much control to the user over how and which of the websites are allowed to play the media automatically in the web browser. But perhaps Edge browser will improve its security features in the newer versions included in Windows 10.