How to Prevent Videos from Autoplaying in Chrome

Look, autoplaying videos are awful. No one likes them, and I honestly don’t understand why this continues to be a thing that happens on the web. Thankfully, if you’re a Chrome user, you can easily stop this from happening.

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Unfortunately, this isn’t a click-click-enable sort of feature—it’s currently tucked away in Chrome’s flags menu. This is where Google hides experimental features and things that aren’t quite ready for prime time. While still not technically anything we’d call “stable,” these features are generally pretty usable for the most part. Just keep in mind that they’re still being developed, so they’re not quite perfect.

To access the feature, just open a new Chrome tab and type the following into the address bar:

chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy

Press Enter. Once the flags page opens, use the dropdown to choose “Document user activation required” and restart your browser.

From now on, you won’t have to deal with autoplaying videos. Thanks, Google.