I regularly have a large number of tabs open, and often several of these tabs are YouTube videos which have been paused. For the sake of an example, let's say I have 12 tabs with paused YouTube videos that I plan to continue to watch later.
Now, Windows Update happens. Or the browser crashes. Or, I miraculously find the time to actually shut down and reboot the PC.
I boot the Google Chrome browser back up and click "Restore Session". Shortly thereafter, all the tabs have loaded again and I will be greeted by a wonderful sea of voices, music, and various other sounds effects all playing on top of one another in a repulsive and incomprehensible lack of synchronization.
If I don't have headphones plugged in, everyone in the room will have this greeting too. (Pro-tip: This can be a useful ice-breaker/conversation starter.)
The first few times this happened, it was entertaining. But I've since grown quite tired of it.
In addition to the awful sound, if I don't go around and pause all those videos one by one, they will play all the way to the end and I will lose my position where I was watching them. If I had the "Auto-Play" function (which I don't) YouTube would presumably after that continue to play some other video in each of the different tabs, and it'd be pretty hopeless to even find the original video again. I'm basically held hostage to have to spend my time going and pausing every video one by one (which is not helped by the lag of the PC simultaneously playing all the videos).
I did find this potential solution discussion for FireFox but I'm using Chrome/Brave and the extension doesn't exist anymore, plus I'm hoping for a solution that is a bit more targeted. This Quora link for a similar question doesn't seem to actually have any answers in it.
To be clear, I quite like that opening a YouTube link will start to play the video. This isn't a problem because it's only one video playing, and I almost certainly just clicked on a link. I'd very much prefer to keep that if possible and not have to click to play every time I open any YouTube video.
However, having dozens or hundreds of YouTube videos which were previously paused play when resuming the browser session is the specific situation I'd like to avoid. I'd like to find the closest thing to having those videos start up again in a paused state when resuming a session. Having those particular tabs not load until they are specifically focused on would also solve the problem, if that's the only solution.
I don't know if this is possible but I definitely appreciate any help/ideas! Thanks so much!
