floating videos

unifex · 05 Jun 2018

Second rant today - I've got to go get some wine

Does anyone know how to prevent floating videos that appear on most leading news websites?

What typically happens: I go to a website, click on some article I might want to read, and see a huge video on top of the page. These videos are set to start playing automatically, this can be prevented in FF by setting "media.autoplay.enabled" to false. However, there is another feature of those videos - as I scroll down the video detaches itself from the page and appears as a floating element, usually on the lower left corner of the page. The video still does not play (because of the above setting), but it obscures a large part of the text and makes the page visually annoying.

Yes, there is a cross on top of that float and I can kill it, but it's annoying that I have to do that all the time. I find that pushing those autoplaying videos is simply disrespect towards the users. I searched many times about how to get rid of them, but nothing works so far.

Barman58 · 05 Jun 2018

Your only recourse, other than what you are doing, is to complain to the site owners or find an alternative source for the information you are looking for that does not use this particular method. The main problem is that many users of these sites actually think floating videos are a useful idea - and the fact that they are increasing in use suggests that they are good for the sites too.

Maybe a subscription site may allow more control of the way content is served but for free sites you're pretty much stuck with what you get