Stopping Youtube videos from auto-playing in Firefox and Chrome

Frequent users of YouTube – which by now is basically most people – have probably learned to tolerate a feature that one could argue is highly annoying. When following a YouTube link the video begins to auto-play when it’s opened. Perhaps this is convenient when you are just referencing a single link or video at a time. However, while YouTube will buffer a portion of the video before auto-playing, users can still experience stuttering issues – even if their connection is quite sufficient.

Matters are much worse when you are opening multiple YouTube links in the background – it’s an auditory and visual orchestra of confusion in your browser. This situation can actually arise quite often, especially if you are a mass consumer of content or media. If each morning you process your email, twitter feed, Facebook wall, or RSS feeds for new and interesting things – many will open links in a background tab and continue on processing the rest of the data.

If this sounds familiar for your morning routine you will definitely be interesting in two browser extensions; one for Firefox and one for Chrome. Until now, you were forced to open a new tab with the link and then click the stop button while the video continued to fully buffer in the background.