Tim Bennett’s blog – Electron Soup

Summary: Install this Greasemonkey script for Firefox and the videos will stop autoplaying.

Some Fairfax news websites (including The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Brisbane Times) inflict videos on their users which begin playing after 5 seconds. For instance, this story: Pakistan turn the screws on luckless Australia.

You’ll notice a couple of obnoxious things. First, you need to interrupt your browsing to hit “stop” on the video player. Second, you have to watch a thirty-second ad before the real content starts. And third, the video doesn’t start automatically if you remove “autostart=1″ from the end of that URL.

After getting fed up with this behaviour, I wrote a script to do something about it: Remove Fairfax autoplay video links. You’ll need Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension installed. Afterwards, the script will do two things without your interaction. On any of smh.com.au, theage.com.au and brisbanetimes.com.au, it will:

• Check whether the current page URL contains “autostart=1″ and, if so, reload the page without that element in the URL.
• Go through all of the hyperlinks on the current page and remove “autostart=1″, so any subsequent pages visited will be free of autoplaying videos.

This script is free and cobbled together from various tutorials around the web. If you like it, please share the link with your friends. In a perfect world, Fairfax would get the picture and put an end to autoplaying videos. However, I think this tactic probably makes money for them, and so they’ll continue to sell out their user experience for more money.