Thanks Reader B,

~~~

Hello Swami,

There's a simple way to do this without addons.

Firefox has an internal setting to stop videos from autoplaying. This sometimes leads to the strange appearance of a pause button on a stopped video. In that case, to play the video, click the pause button then click the play button. Here's where you set this feature:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button promising to be careful.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste autop and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the media.autoplay.enabled preference to switch the value from true to false

Some users are looking for something a bit different which is for tabs opened in the background not to start autoplaying until you activate them. There's another preference for that:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button promising to be careful.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste visible and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the media.block-play-until-visible preference to switch the value from false to true

Note: it doesn't turn off automatically when you switch away from the tab.

Plugin players

Try setting Flash to Click-to-Play ("Ask to Activate"). This will delay Flash from starting on a page until you approve it. Open the Add-ons page using either:

Ctrl+Shift+a

"3-bar" menu button (or Tools menu) > Add-ons

In the left column, click Plugins. Look for "Shockwave Flash" and change "Always Activate" to "Ask to Activate".

Regards!