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I Dream of Silence From My Web Browser?

Posted by Cliff on from the flash-wav-files-should-have-a-mute-function dept.

BRAINBUZ asks: "I'm finding more and more web-pages are blasting sound at me. Everyone who chooses to blast sound at me seems to manage to make their sound files much louder than what I was trying to listen to. I am finding this to be even more annoying than popups -- at least with pop-ups I could click the X and be done with it, pages with sound don't give an option to turn it off without closing the browser, or muting all sound. When I can, I avoid sites with sound, but just today I was checking my balance on one of my credit cards only to have some awful noise nearly blow out my speakers from one of their ads, for themselves. Opera has a feature to turn off sound in web pages, which doesn't work on most noisy pages. Haven't been able to find a similar option in Firefox or IE. The next killer feature, what I really want from my browser, is the ability to shut every web site up. I get security warnings from my browsers all of the time, why can't I get a warning about every media file (whether it be audio, video, flash, ActiveX or Java based) on the page that wants to play and the option to play or not play them?"

3 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. FlashMute by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    FlashMute - cross-browser Flash muting.

  2. I cannot count the number of times I've been... by Wisgary · · Score: 1, Informative

    ...in this situation. Here I am reading the news/video game article/PC article when all of a sudden a car insurance ad BLASTS at me with a screeching car sound. You can substitute screeching car sound with any conceivable annoying sound in existance. My solution? Adblock the hell out of them.

  3. Most of these are flash... by Matt+Perry · · Score: 3, Informative
    Most of these sounds come from Flash objects. You can block Flash with FlashBlock. It puts a play button where the Flash object is. As an alternative, I would recommend using NoScript. It allows you to block JavaScript, Flash, Java, and other plugins and then whitelist sites that you go to all of the time. You can enable Flash, Java, and plugins by clicking to play like with FlashBlock. If you are just visiting for a moment then you can temporarily enable for that site just for your browser session. I've found that this fixes all of the sound issues that you are talking about.

    only to have some awful noise nearly blow out my speakers from one of their ads, for themselves.
    Then install AdBlock and the AdBlock Filterset.G Updater. Ads that play sounds are yet another reason in a long list why I block ads myself. Some people don't agree with blocking ads. Well, make up your own mind on what to do. Personally I take the approach that several bad advertisers ruin it for everyone so I block them all.
    --
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