Firefox has some great features, but one of my favorites is the ability to disable autoplay for videos. We’ve all had one of those moments: your speakers are turned up and you browse to a website with an annoying advertisement that plays immediately.

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This feature stopped working for me somewhere in the Firefox 65 beta releases. Also, the usual setting in the preference page (under Privacy & Security) seems to be missing.

Luckily we can edit Firefox’s configuration directly to get this feature working again. Open up a new browser tab, go to about:config, and adjust these settings:

  • Set media.autoplay.default to 1 to disable video autoplay for all sites

  • Set media.autoplay.allow-muted to false to disable video autoplay even for muted videos

Those changes take effect for any new pages that you open after making the change.