Stop Annoying Auto-Playing Media in Firefox

photo credit: floeschie

I check out a lot of Internet marketing squeeze pages and it drives me absolutely crazy when media begins to play automatically when I load them. With the InstaClick Firefox add-on I often load pages in a new tab with the intention of reading them later. Also, my settings on Outlook load web links without changing to a browser view. When audio suddenly blasts from a page (or several) while I’m trying to prioritize, I get quite irritated.
Most of the time I get so irritated when this happens that I close the tab without even checking out the page. I understand that people – Internet marketers especially – are trying their best to get visitors’ attention. The auto-playing media certainly does that, but not in a good way. At least not for me. If you have this same issue, I am happy to announce an easy fix for those of you who use Firefox and aren’t afraid to muck about with the configuration a bit. All you have to do is go to the configuration settings for Firefox (type “about:config” in the address bar). In the filter at the top of the page, enter:

media.autoplay.enabled

Simply change the setting to false and you’re all set. This should stop all the annoying, unnerving voices from yelling at you when you open new plugins.