Autoplay Guard

Stops videos and audio from playing on their own. Media starts only when you click play.

Autoplay Guard stops videos and audio from starting on their own. Nothing plays until you click play. No more news articles that start talking when you open them, feeds that play every video you scroll past, or background music you have to hunt down to turn off. Pages stay quiet and still until you choose to watch something. HOW IT WORKS When a page tries to start a video or audio clip without you asking, Autoplay Guard pauses it before it begins. The player stays on the page with its normal controls. When you want to watch, press play as usual and it starts right away. Autoplay Guard tells your choices apart from the page's own attempts: • Clicking a play button, a video or a video link counts as your choice, so the media plays. • Keyboard shortcuts that a player handles itself (like Space or K to play/pause) work as usual. • Scrolling, including with Space, Page Down or the arrow keys, does not start anything. • Once you start a video, it is allowed to keep playing. If the site then switches the same player to the next video by itself, that next video waits for you again. WHAT IT BLOCKS • Videos and audio with the autoplay attribute • Media started by page scripts • Players added to the page later, such as in feeds and infinite scroll • Players inside embedded frames from other websites • Players built with web components (shadow DOM) • Muted videos that unmute themselves after a few seconds FEATURES • One-click switch: turn protection on or off everywhere. • Per-site allowlist: allow autoplay on sites where you want it, straight from the toolbar popup. • Two modes: block all autoplaying media, or block only media with sound and let silent background videos play. • Counter: the toolbar icon shows how many media elements were stopped on the current page. • Grey icon when protection is off, so you always know the state. PRIVACY Autoplay Guard collects no data at all. • It makes no network requests and has no analytics, tracking or ads. • Your settings (on/off, mode, allowed sites) are stored with Chrome's sync storage, so they follow you to your other signed-in browsers. Nothing is sent to the developer. • The per-tab blocked counter lives only in memory and is cleared when the browser closes. • The extension never reads, records or sends page content, form data or browsing history. WHY IT NEEDS ACCESS TO ALL WEBSITES Autoplay can happen on any site, including inside players embedded from other domains. To stop media before it starts, the extension runs a small script on each page as it loads. The script only watches audio and video elements and does nothing else. The code is not minified or obfuscated, and no code is downloaded from the internet. GOOD TO KNOW • Settings changes apply after you reload the page. The popup offers a one-click Reload button. • Clicking anywhere on a page gives that page a few seconds in which it may start media, because the browser cannot tell the extension where you clicked. This is a known limitation and is being improved. • If a player takes a long time to load after you click it, it may need a second click on play. • Allowing a site does not cover players embedded on it from other websites. Those are still blocked. • Some sites mute their player after autoplay is refused, so you may need to unmute once you press play. FEEDBACK Found a site where something autoplays anyway, or where a video won't play when you click it? Leave a review with the site address. Every reported site becomes a test case before it is fixed.