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Comment by ethana | Hacker News Reader

I notice a lot of people that used to watch silly videos on Youtube are now watching them on their Facebook stream just because it's re-shared by their friends. The fact that videos autoplay by default is attracting people to watch it right then instead of clicking a link to Youtube.

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I know this is absolutely the wrong place to complain about that, but I really really hope Facebook will stop having its videos as Flash-only.

It's such a "blast from the past" to see the "Flash plugin not installed" everytime someone shares a video.

The worse problem is videos autoplaying - using, wasting my bandwidth for videos I may not open.

You can turn that off, you know.

(For example by disabling Flash :))

I know that. I'm referring to his "facebook should switch from flash."

If facebook switches to HTML5 I'll not be happy. Because, there's no easy way to disable video autoplay. I've asked multiple times on HN but I've still not gotten a way to do that - except Youtube (there's an extension for that.)

  var videoElements = document.getElementsByTagName("video");
  
  for (var videoElement of videoElements) {
    videoElement.removeAttribute("autoplay");
  }

...in a Userscript ought to do it. HTML5 gives more power to those who can write code than we had with Flash.

That said, this does not qualify as easy for most users. If there is enough demand for a "never autoplay" feature among users, browers ought to implement an option in the user interface. It is not a good reason for keeping Flash around.

For some reason, I cannot reply to your latest comment

You can turn off autoplay easily here

https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=videos

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