How-To

How to Stop Autoplay Video and Audio in Microsoft Edge

By Brian Burgess

Updated August 22, 2018

Don’t you hate when you visit a website and a video starts blasting sound at you? Luckily, Microsoft Edge now allows you to disable auto-playing media.

Microsoft continues to add new features to its Edge browser in Windows 10 all the time. When you start diving into Edge, you’ll discover it can be used for many things like reading Ebooks and PDFs, annotating and sharing web pages, clutter-free printing, and more. But starting with Redstone 5 Build 17704, the company announced what, to many, is a far more important feature – blocking media autoplay. Here is a look at how to use it and what to expect with this new feature for Microsoft Edge.

Block Multimedia Autoplay in Edge

To block or limit autoplay media in Edge, open the Options menu and go to Settings > Advanced and there you will see a drop-down menu under Site Settings.

The drop-down contains three different options for the way Edge handles autoplay media on sites:

• Allow: This is the default setting and a site will continue to play videos when a tab is first viewed in the foreground, at the site’s discretion.
• Limit: Restricts autoplay to only work when videos are muted, so you’re never surprised by sound. Once you click anywhere on the page, autoplay is re-enabled and will continue to be allowed within that domain in that tab.
• Block: This prevents autoplay on all sites until you interact with the media content (you need to click the play button). However, Microsoft notes this may break some sites due to the strict enforcement.

Keep in mind that whichever option you choose, it’s a universal setting and will be the same for all sites you visit. If you have it set to “Block” some sites might not work. If you want to re-enable media auto-play on a per site basis, visit the website, click the left website ID button on the address bar and then “Media autoplay settings” under the Website Permissions section.

Then you can change the media autoplay option to what you want it to be for that site only. Whatever you choose in Advanced Settings will always be uniform across all sites, but this allows you to tweak it on a site by site basis.

More browsers are starting to move toward this the trend of disabling autoplay media. For example, Google recently added the ability to mute autoplay audio in tabs on Chrome. And we have covered how to disable autoplay videos in Chrome on Android and there are different extensions that work for the desktop version. But having this ability built-in for Edge on Windows 10 makes for a more satisfying browsing experience.