How to stop autoplaying HTML5 videos

P. Petropoulos blocked Flash videos from playing automatically without his permission. Now he wants to block HTML5 videos, as well.
On New Year’s Day, I told you how to block videos that play automatically when you visit a Web page. In fact, if such a video is starting to play right about…now, you may want to revisit that article.

My previous instructions concentrated on Flash videos, however, and Flash isn’t the only technology designed to annoy you with unwanted videos. So now I’ll tell you how to block HTML5 videos in Chrome and Firefox.
[Have a tech question? Ask PCWorld Contributing Editor Lincoln Spector. Send your query to answer@pcworld.com.]
Alas, I could find no solution for Internet Explorer. If you find one, just put it in the Comments section below.

Chrome

You need to download and install a Chrome extension called, simply enough, Stop YouTube HTML5 Autoplay, by Port Zero. (If that link fails, try the developer’s site and click the link provided there.) And yes, it blocks non-Youtube HTML5 videos as well.
This program, to use a marketing term for one major tech company, “just works.” Install and enable it, and HTML5 videos won’t start automatically. You can click the video to get it going.

Firefox

You don’t need an add-on or an extension. You can take care of this with a setting in Firefox itself.
Open a new Firefox window or tab, and in the address field (where you would normally type a URL), enter about:config. Then Click the scary I’ll be careful, I promise button.

You’ll get a long list of settings, and above them all, a search field. In that search field, type autoplay and press Enter. This will bring up one entry: media.autoplay.enabled.
Note the Value column. It will probably be True. Double-click the entry and the Value will change to False.

The next time you visit a page with an HTML5 autoplaying video, the video box will appear with an image in it. But the video won’t start until you tell it to.

Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2922403/how-to-stop-autoplaying-html5-videos.html#tk.rss_howto

Mozilla responds to Firefox user backlash over Pocket integration

Last week, Mozilla updated Firefox with Pocket integration. Over the weekend, some Firefox users began to voice their displeasure over the move on public forums like Bugzilla, Google Groups, and Hacker News. Pocket is a service for managing a reading list of online articles (it allows you to save stories, videos, and websites to check out later). Pocket is already offered as a Firefox add-on, and although Mozilla was developing a homegrown Reading List feature for the browser, the company decided to simply integrate Pocket directly into Firefox.
The complaints center around the fact Pocket is a proprietary third-party service, already exists as an add-on, and is not a required component for a browser. Integrating Pocket directly into Firefox means it cannot be removed, only disabled.





The argument follows that bundling the Pocket add-on directly into Firefox would have been a better option. Add-ons can always be entirely removed from Firefox.
While Firefox’s user interface allows the user to remove Pocket from the toolbar and menu,

the only way to properly disable it is in about:config (search for browser.pocket.enabled and set it to false).  

 Firefox users point out that this isn’t very user friendly, and is very unlike Mozilla.

Finally, many Firefox fans feel there wasn’t nearly enough communication that this Pocket integration was coming. Mozilla is typically very transparent about its plans, and while this didn’t come out of the blue, many were still taken by complete surprise.
Those are the complaints. When VentureBeat reached out to Mozilla for an explanation over the weekend, the company took some time and responded a couple days later with the following statement:

Pocket has been a popular Firefox add-on for a long time and we’ve seen that users love to save interesting Web content to easily revisit it later, so it was an easy choice to offer Pocket as a service in Firefox and we’ve gotten lots of positive feedback about the integration from users.
All the code related to this integration within Firefox is open source and Pocket has licensed all the Firefox integration code under the MPLv2 license. On top of that, Pocket asked Mozilla for input on how to improve their policy, based on early comments from Mozillians. After that discussion, Pocket updated their privacy policy in early May to explain more precisely how they handle data. You can read Pocket’s privacy policy here.
Directly integrating Pocket into the browser was a choice we made to provide this feature to our users in the best way possible. To disable Pocket, you can remove it from your toolbar or menu. If Pocket is removed from the toolbar or menu, then the feature is effectively disabled, though you can still find it again by accessing it in the Customize Panel. You can find detailed instructions here.

In other words, Mozilla believes it has done everything in the way an open source company should. For hardcore Firefox users, however, that may not be enough.
At the end of the day, Mozilla has bundled a closed-source tool into its open-source browser. Many believe this was unnecessary, regardless of how the company went about it, because Pocket is not critical to Firefox’s functioning and thus should have remained as an optional add-on.

Source: http://venturebeat.com/2015/06/09/mozilla-responds-to-firefox-user-backlash-over-pocket-integration/