Try Out Microsoft Edge’s New Auto-Play Video Blocker

Despite being offered to Windows and Mac users as a work-in-progress, the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser keeps evolving, and every little update that it receives brings new functionality to both platforms.

The most recent update is support for blocking automatically playing media, a feature that is already available in other browsers, but which is still being developed for the new Edge.

Auto-playing media has become more and more intrusive in the last couple of years, and it basically comes down to videos or sounds that begin playing on page load. This is something that a lot of websites use, and if you’re a frequent news reader, you probably noticed that there are a lot of portals out there that play videos when you load an article.

Fortunately, Microsoft is working on resolving this annoyance, and the company has recently confirmed that it was developing a blocker to prevent media from automatically playing.

The very first version of this blocker is now available for testers to try it out, and all they need is the latest version of Microsoft Edge Canary. I tested the steps detailed here on version 77.0.211.0, and the flag is already there, so you must be running at least this build.

First of all, a few things that you should know about this auto-playing media blocker.

Microsoft says it doesn’t affect the most popular websites, so you may not necessarily notice any difference if you enable this blocker and hope it would block auto-playing content on high-profile pages.

Then, the blocker doesn’t come with any configuration settings, and this means you are not allowed to edit the blocking list or tweak its filters for restricting content that it might actually miss.

The flag exists on both Windows and macOS, so you can use the steps below to enable it on either platform.

The first step comes down to updating Microsoft Edge Canary to the latest version, so you must be running at least the build that I mentioned above. Then, launch the…