It’s clear that you should be able to set a block/allow/limit choice for each website within the menu that’s accessible from the URL bar, but that functionality doesn’t seem to be quite live yet. Instead, you’ll need to click the small link, Manage permissions, at the bottom. Unfortunately, the media autoplay controls within the website permissions gives you two choices: the default, global choice, and.nothing. That unveils what looks to be a per-site autoplay control. Clicking media autoplay settings unrolls the media permissions screen in the example below. You may see this screen if you haven’t set any permissions for the site. Unfortunately, there’s nothing to do here but click the Media autoplay settings link at the bottom. Left-clicking it reveals the website permissions. If you hover your cursor over the padlock icon within Edge’s URL bar, you’ll see a popup: Show site information. Site-by-site controls are being worked onĮdge also has per-site controls, though they’re a bit finicky and perhaps not all that intuitive. SFGate appears to mute its videos by default, though that behavior may differ from site to site.
#CHROME AUTOPLAY VIDEO PCWORLD WINDOWS#
What if you select Limit? It’s hard to predict the behavior for all sites, but for, the large centralized videos don’t play, but the smaller windows do. You can still manually click a YouTube video, for example, and it will play normally.) Using the Block setting, Edge just blocks videos from autoplaying. But the site doesn’t play the video, so in this case, Edge does its job. Even turning on the global “block” command, the site manages to load and display still images where you’d expect to see video: in large players centered on the page, as well as pop-up windows that float into the corners of the screen. Here, your browser is deluged by ads and pop-up videos. One of the best torture tests of any browser or ad-blocker is the San Francisco Chronicle’s mass-market website,. If Edge is doing its job, a blocked video won’t actually play. “Blocking” a video still allows the site to create a popup window, as shown here in the lower right-hand corner. Note that whatever permission level you choose will become the default behavior for autoplaying video, unless you choose a specific permission on a per-site basis, below. The Limit option falls into a middle ground, which we’ll explain below. The Allow and Block options are self-explanatory-keep in mind that block tries to block all video. You can select one of the options from the drop-down menu we mentioned previously: allow, limit, or block. Here, you’ll find what you’re looking for: the global media autoplay controls. The global media autoplay controls within Microsoft Edge are buried in the Advanced portion of the Settings menu. What we want to access is in the Advanced menu. The default is the General settings, where you can configure the Edge theme and other options. That, in turn, will open the Settings menu, now subdivided into a number of categories of options. Scroll all the way down to the Settings heading at the end. Clicking it exposes the sidebar menu, where you’ll have access to Favorites, the Reading List, and more. Microsoft says it may tweak or add other options in the future, so it’s possible these choices will change.įor now, you’ll need to access the Settings menu, which in Edge is concealed behind the ellipsis (three dots) menu in the upper right-hand corner of the browser. For me, BeSpacific is one of my daily must-reads and has been for 14 years straight.Right now, global controls for autoplaying videos allow you to choose among three choices: block, limit, and allow. She posts multiple items every day, covering the gamut of law, technology and knowledge discovery and topics ranging from cybersecurity to legal research to government regulation to civil liberties to IP and more. “Launched in 2002, BeSpacific is one of the longest-running legal blogs and, remarkably, Sabrina seems more prolific today than ever. BeSpacific: “No one better has her finger on the pulse of the legal information world than Sabrina Pacifici, law librarian and author of the blog BeSpacific,” writes blogger Robert Ambrogi.