Join the AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the Firefox leadership team to celebrate Firefox 20th anniversary and discuss Firefox’s future on Mozilla Connect. Mark your calendar on Thursday, November 14, 18:00 - 20:00 UTC!

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

How to stop videos from loading on metered connection?

  • 2 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 48 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

more options

I'm currently using nightly and, while videos with audio are muted by media.autoplay.ask-permission, and further they are paused if you also set allow-muted to false, the problem is that they still load.

On a metered [or slow] connection, this is a big problem.

Viewing a news article on ABC [for example] pre-loads the entire video in the background.

To make matters worse; Even after the entire video has been cached, a steady stream of 200KB/s is still continually streamed from the CDN.

Example link: https://abcnews.go.com/US/noreaster-season-east-coast/story?id=58738494

If you monitor bandwidth with Firefox's network monitor, or a 3rd party tool [like jnettop for Linux], you'll see that the page continues to load video data.

Not only would I expect it to not load any if playback is disabled, but it certainly shouldn't continue to load data, perpetually, after the entire video has been buffered.

I'm currently using nightly and, while videos with audio are muted by media.autoplay.ask-permission, and further they are paused if you also set allow-muted to false, the problem is that they still load. On a metered [or slow] connection, this is a big problem. Viewing a news article on ABC [for example] pre-loads the entire video in the background. To make matters worse; Even after the entire video has been cached, a steady stream of 200KB/s is still continually streamed from the CDN. Example link: https://abcnews.go.com/US/noreaster-season-east-coast/story?id=58738494 If you monitor bandwidth with Firefox's network monitor, or a 3rd party tool [like jnettop for Linux], you'll see that the page continues to load video data. Not only would I expect it to not load any if playback is disabled, but it certainly shouldn't continue to load data, perpetually, after the entire video has been buffered.

All Replies (2)

more options

I don't see any options in the latest browser so that would mean you have to find addons that would provide that options to not load videos unless you click to load videos.

more options