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I Dream of Silence From My Web Browser?
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?"
If the reason you dont want sounds is because your say listening to music via another app you could get a 2nd sound output device (say a cheap usb 'soundcard') make that primary ound output and not plug anything into it. Then set your sound app to use the other soundcard that has speakers on it.
You shouldn't have to goto these lengths to do it, but it would work.
You say you were checking your balance. I would assume that this is your bank. Have you considered writing/calling them and letting them exactly how annoying a full-blast sound is? I am sure they would not tolerate such loud sounds inside of their bank, so I really do not think they would approve of such loud sounds coming from their website. The website was likely designed by an external company with little oversight by the bank.
Of course, this only fixes one sight. Have you thought of writing a plug-in for Mozilla/Firefox similar to the wonderful flash-block plugin?
strike
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Most of these sounds come from Flash objects. You can block Flash with FlashBlock. It puts a play button where the Flash object is.
Of course, then, you either get no flash, or when you explicitly play the flash, you still get blasted away.
I asked about this ages (I think maybe even two years ago) for Mozilla. There's even a bug filed for it [and, OMB, it was filed almost exactly six years ago ]. It's got 53 votes, maybe it needs more: Bug 24418 - Allow user to turn on and off rendering of video/audio (disable sound).
What'd really be nice is a volume control in an easily-accessed space on the browser, so you could, if you want, leave the browser sounds enabled, but at a mix level you're comfortable with.
One can always complain to the sites and the parent company of whatever is being advertised. If you take the time write up a polite but firm complaint, just copy and paste it and send it off to the contact addy. Something along these lines, obviously write your own. "Dear sir/madam: Your advertisement x at site y contains an intrusive flash animation and sound package that is quite startling and annoying. In a business situation, the last thing you would want to do is to annoy any potential customers. It "gets your attention" but in a most negative way, and accidently hitting it at work where it blares out it becomes disruptive and is very unprofessional sounding. Many research studies have proven it, a tasteful non animated and quiet ad is much preferred by most internet consumers, witness the success of Googles non audio and quiet text-ad based system."
DON'T send it to the webmaster at site y, they are the doofusses who make money off of faking out the company that they need some advanced macromedia crapware ad. Those guys will blow you off, do some looking and go directly to the company, find some relevant VPs to CC the complaint to, and not the marketing VPs either, they are in on it and are usually mesmerised by their own leet skills, useless talking to them. You send it to some operations manager at a company and the media relations people. Point out that consumers are switching in droves to ad blocking software precisely because ads have become so annoying that it is hard to even remain on a web page at some sites.
In short, right after SPAM, Flash is the most hideous part of the web, and it's spyware to boot. Macromedia doesn't get near the dissin' they deserve as e-vile. It's perfectly fine if you are going to a Flash site on purpose that uses Flash for some artsy fartsy content, but that is a tiny fraction of how Flash is used.
Yeah, I know it's a wait and I know it's Windows, but apparently you'll be able to control the volume of individual programs.
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