Microsoft Edge Chromium lacks the ability to control videos autoplay, legacy Edge already provides a setting for that. Latest Microsoft Edge Canary received a new flag that will algorithmically limit media autoplay on websites except that of popular ones such as YouTube, when enabled.
Autoplaying of videos on news sites is a regular phenomenon, this is an annoyance. Microsoft addressed this in Classic Edge browser by offering a global (menu > Settings > Advanced > Media Autoplay) and per-site setting.
By default, Edge allows Media’s video and sound to be played automatically but by using the setting mentioned before, you can limit or block that from happening on all or certain websites.
When you set the Media Autoplay setting to “Limit”, Edge browser blocks autoplaying media that plays with sound. Microsoft brought something similar to this in Edge Preview builds, and is now available behind a flag in Canary 77.0.211.0.
What this means is Microsoft not bringing sound content setting from Chromium to Edge insider builds, they’re integrating the feature already available in old Edge browser.
We’re working on adding a global and per-site setting similar to what we have in the current version of Edge 😊
— Kyle Pflug (@kylealden) June 11, 2019
The “Limit Media Autoplay” experimental feature when enabled, “algorithmically limits certain websites from playing media automatically”, however, popular sites such as YouTube won’t be affected.
To lessen the autoplaying of video with sound in Edge Chromium
1.Visit edge://flags
2. Search for Autoplay and for “Limit Media Autoplay ”
3. Select “Enabled”, restart the browser.
Note: Most of the settings for flags are not choosable in the current build, this could be a bug, expect it to be fixed soon.
Expect the UI for Media Autoplay setting to appear with the next updates in Edge Settings.
Related articles:
Firefox 69 allows blocking both audio and video for Autoplay Media
Chrome: How to disable Videos Autoplay using Autoplay Policy
Future Chrome versions Won’t Autoplay Media in the background tabs
Microsoft Edge gets an option to mute a tab playing audio
