How to Completely Disable ‘Autoplay’ (Video Auto-Play) in Microsoft Edge

Autoplay is a polarizing feature on the modern web. When you open a news article or scroll through a social media feed, video elements are often programmed to begin playing immediately, consuming significant bandwidth and occasionally blasting unexpected audio through your speakers. While Microsoft Edge attempts to manage this behaviour by intelligently “limiting” autoplay based on your past interactions with specific domains, this heuristic approach is often inadequate. If you are browsing on a metered connection (like a mobile hotspot) or simply prefer absolute silence until you explicitly click a play button, you must force Edge to block all autoplay events.

This guide explains how to completely disable video and audio autoplay system-wide in Microsoft Edge.

Disable Autoplay via Edge Settings

By default, Microsoft Edge sets the “Media autoplay” flag to “Limit.” We must change this configuration to “Block” to completely neutralize automated video rendering.

1. Open Microsoft Edge.
2. Click the three horizontal dots (Settings and more) located in the top-right corner of the window.
3. Select Settings from the drop-down menu.
4. In the left-hand navigation pane, click on Cookies and site permissions.
5. Scroll down the right-hand pane until you find the “All permissions” section.
6. Click on Media autoplay.
7. You will see a drop-down menu labelled “Control if audio and video play automatically on sites.” Click the menu and select Block.

Verify the Lockdown

The “Block” policy is enforced immediately for all new tabs; no browser restart is required.

To verify the restriction is active, navigate to a website notorious for auto-playing content (such as a major news publication’s homepage or YouTube). The HTML5 video player element will load, but the video will remain paused indefinitely. The first frame of the video may display as a static thumbnail, and the site will wait indefinitely for an explicit mouse click on the Play icon before streaming any data or outputting audio. Your browsing experience is now completely immune to jarring, unexpected media.