Much to the irritation of autoplay-hating Facebook users around the globe, the company last week announced plans to start forcefully autoplaying audio for videos users stumble upon when scrolling on their respective newsfeeds, which could prove for an unruly behavior of videos on the site, even for those you don't even want to view.
Facebook Autoplay Has Gotten More Intrusive
While Facebook says that the feature was added because of positive feedback, it's no secret among Facebook users that autoplay is kind of a nuisance. But there's no need to fret, because like a number of things, there's an app to take care of that — it's uniquely named "Disable HTML5 Autoplay," and it'll work on both Chrome and Opera browsers.
Disable HTML5 Autoplay
Disable HTML5 Autoplay lets users, as the name implies, block automatic audio and video before it even begins playing. At present, the extension is only available for Opera and Chrome, but Firefox users will soon also get it, the creator said, as reported by The Next Web.
This comes at a time when Facebook's Autoplay feature is actually causing more bad than good, as per Huffington Post's article discussing the trauma caused by autoplay behavior for videos that are violent, which annoyingly forces itself into consciousness without warning.
Not Just Facebook
What's specifically ecstatic about the extension is that it not only works with Facebook exclusively, but with all videos employing an autoplay feature. Also, anytime the extension prevents a video from automatically playing, it notifies the user as such, right in the upper right corner of the browser, where other extensions are housed.
You Can Even Exempt Sites
Of course, there's also a handy "Mode Rules List" which bypasses any website listed therein, so if there's a particular website which contains videos users don't want to disable autoplay for, that's entirely possible. Although not as standard as a "whitelist" functionality, it still does what it's supposed to do. The developer even has detailed instructions on how to use it.
The extension isn't new, however; it's been around since 2016. Only now is it becoming evident because of Facebook's problematic decision to autoplay everything inside a user's newsfeed when they show up.
You can find the extension for Chrome at the Chrome Web Store or the Opera version at Opera's add-ons site. For coders curious about its code, those are also available via GitHub. Enabling the extension is no sweat. Just download it for your respective browser, and it'll install automatically in the case of Chrome. That's basically it. You may now browse Facebook without fear of autoplay.
Facebook's new autoplay behavior for videos was announced alongside its forthcoming TV app, which people can soon use to view Facebook videos on their TV sets. The behavior carries over when the site is used on mobile, except when the handset is set to silent mode. In addition to autoplay with sound, videos will also scale the entire screen on mobile, which should be useful for viewing videos filmed in portrait mode.
Thoughts about Disable HTML5 Autoplay, or Facebook's autoplay feature? Feel free to sound off in the comments section below!
