There is nothing more annoying than videos on websites that play automatically, especially if they have sound. Fortunately, Safari has a handy feature that allows you to stop videos from playing automatically. You can set it per website, where you even have the choice between videos with and without sound. This way you prevent videos from automatically playing on the Mac in Safari.
Prevent autoplay on Mac in Safari
With the setting in Safari for the Mac you can determine how videos should react when you open websites. You can use an umbrella setting, but you can also set it per website. Follow these steps to adjust the settings:
- Open Safari on your Mac and click Safari > Settings in the top left.
- Go to the Websites section and click on Autoplay in the left menu.
- You will then see an overview of websites that you currently have open, including any configured websites. By default, the setting per website is Stop media with sound. You can change this to Never autoplay and Allow autoplay of everything. If you don’t want anything to play automatically, choose Never play automatically.
- Once you have adjusted the setting for a website, this setting will be moved to the Configured Websites heading.
- At the bottom, under When visiting other websites, you can adjust the setting for other websites to one of the three settings mentioned above.
You can also adjust a setting for your current website directly from the Safari window. For example, if you have Facebook open and want to quickly change its setting, right-click on the address bar and choose Settings for [naam website]. Then select the desired setting under Autoplay.
Once you have set up the website for a specific website following these steps, it will be moved to the Configured Websites heading in Safari’s settings. You will then always see an overview of the websites for which you have set the setting separately.
You can also adjust website notification settings on the Websites page in Safari settings. You can read how this works in our separate tip.
