If you haven’t been living under a rock, you would know that Microsoft is testing a new Chromium-based version of Edge browser. The company has ditched its own rendering engine and made available the new version of the browser in beta, developer, and the Canary channels. Microsoft has steadily been perking up the feature set of its browser, adding to the mix today one of the most requested user features.
Microsoft Edge has added the ability to block auto video playback on certain websites, something which is a nuisance across the Internet and we can all relate to that. Edge Canary channel has pushed out an update, bumping the build up to #77.0.211.0 and introduces the flag (#edge-limit-autoplay) for users to try out.
Microsoft Edge browser’s Senior Product Manager, Kyle Pflug has previously teased on Twitter that the company was working on a similar feature.
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
If you’re testing out the Canary build of Microsoft Edge on your Windows 10 PC, you can navigate to ‘edge://flags’ to access your experimental flags page. It would feel very familiar to Chrome’s flags page if you have tinkered with the same. Search for the flag titled ‘Limit Media Autoplay’ and enable it to block auto playback of videos and GIFs on websites.
As you can read in the screenshot above, Microsoft says that the feature will work with some websites. This flag won’t affect the media playback on some of the most popular websites, which could often be the root of the problem and make users want to have a built-in feature like this one.
Microsoft is, however, said to be working on a per-site media playback blocking feature, which sounds great, so I will wait for its rollout to stop auto playback on websites from annoying me. If you haven’t had a taste of the Chromium-based Edge experience, well, you’ll find the steps to download and test the new browser right here.
