A little rant here. I start my day going through my RSS feeds and clicking on news items in that interest me, this would open a tab in my browser. This use to be somewhat annoying, because if there was a media story it would often just start playing. So the browser makers solved that by muting the volume. This is a terrible solution, because although the audio was annoying at least you realized the media was playing. So now, you don’t hear, the relatively low bandwith audio. Although it’s still using bandwith. But the much much higher bandwidth video is still playing. To make things worse after playing the video these stupid news sites, just continue to the next video. And often the video that is played to begin with has nothing to do with the news story I click on, it’s just some random news story. A better solution would be to not play any media at all until the user clicked OK.
OK I’ve basically been solving my problem myself by usually not being online when I click on these links, and only start them by pressing refresh when I get to the tab. I could also “Work offline” in the browser. I guess I forgot to deactivate my network this morning.