I didn't think this was gonna be so hard to make a video NOT have native controls. And it's not, at least not for the majority of web developers. You have a nice controls attribute on the video tag. Add it, you have native controls, don't add it and you won't. The thing is however that many sites for many different reasons specify their own controls using Javascript. And I'd like to continue doing the same for Wikipedia. And here is my problem pictured above. I call it the 'Flash of Native Controls'. Something like this is extremely distracting for visitors of the webcontent. The solution seems simple. Just remove that controls attribute from your HTML. But I'd rather not do that.. And the reason is because at Wikipedia, we have many re-users of our generated HTML content. But most of those re-users don't use the same JS stack. Removing the controls attribute means they won't have videocontrols. I want controls, I just want MY controls