ha. even extensions can't manage it, at least in chrome.

it's an arms race, and you're not on the team with the money.

(I put a ton of effort into this about 6 months ago, and I managed to stop about a third of auto-playing videos)

Thanks. What kind of effort? What did you learn?

I put a small amount effort into this; digging around in the source of a few sites, reading event traces, trying to work out the relationships between elements and so on. I'm not really a front end guy so I'm not sure if i'm failing due to ineptitude, things being generated and deployed in a way that makes them hard to read, or if they're deliberately obfuscated. Sounds like you believe the latter. Securing video start metrics from user interference must be... ahem, pretty highly incentivized.

EDIT: Firefox will add a permission popup, which is already in nightly. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/block-autoplay

a half a day of googling for people who have solved the problem, and experimenting with 3 different chrome extensions and some under the hood settings.

i'm a back-end developer, but it seems like unless you're going to go as far as using the noscript extension, there's no way to stop the various video injection scripts. but I only used Chrome, so if Firefox is better I honestly might consider switching. I know Firefox has a mute-all-tabs-by-default setting/addon , which mitigates a lot of my problems with web video.

Following up. I was doing it wrong. They changed the config schema for this stuff as of FF63. This post explains how to use the new controls properly, which worked for me: https://www.howtogeek.com/341690/how-to-prevent-videos-from-...

I have now a permission pop-up to allow autoplay, which remembers pref on a per site basis. Btw this is FF64, from ubuntu repo:

$ apt policy firefox

firefox:

  Installed: 64.0+build3-0ubuntu0.18.04.1

GLHF.

The Disable HTML5 Autoplay extension in FF stops it for me.