How to prevent Firefox opens a website if the mouse pointer is some time idle on top of it
When I open certain sites, Firefox (unlike Chrome or Edge) opens some of the links inside simply because I leave the mouse pointer stalled over it - even by accident. I want to disable this feature, but so far nothing helps. An example is for instance www.nieuwsblad.be (or any other news site). Even if you don't understand Dutch, some articles show an indicator - see the image below - that marks there's a video that will start playing. If I leave the mouse pointer by accident on such page, it will be opened even if I don't click! I only want pages to open when I click on the link, not because the mouse pointer was for some time parked over it. Anybody an idea how to disable this very annoying behavior?
All Replies (2)
Start Firefox in Safe Mode {web link}
A small dialog should appear. Click Start In Safe Mode (not Refresh). Is the problem still there?
It's hard to test because sometimes the autoplay block stops it from happening, and other times it just seems to stop for no reason...
The ones with the play button run a script on the mouseenter event that plays the preview and eventually navigates the page. These are very difficult to remove individually. One possible strategy is to create a global event handler for the entire article that intercepts and discards mouseenter events so that no other event handler in the page can receive them.
For example:
document.body.addEventListener('mouseenter', function(e){
e.stopPropagation();
}, true);
I'm not sure that works; the scripts in the article do not behave inconsistently, so failure to play could be due to other reasons.
Modified by jscher2000 - Support Volunteer