Slashdot Mirror
Chrome Extension Helps Find Noisy Tabs
mutetab writes "I recently wrote a Chrome extension called MuteTab that helps you narrow down which tab is making a sound by detecting which tabs contain plugins, HTML5 audio/video, and Java applets. It also gives you a right click menu that will mute tabs (via Javascript APIs when available, otherwise hiding them like FlashBlock does) and can automatically mute background tabs. Be sure to read the FAQ writeup to learn about some ways we can improve detecting which tab has sound and mute it." This really seems like stuff that should be a built in browser preference: like maybe an option to only allow audio out of the visible tab.
Mostly I find the bells and whistles of new browsers to be useless... but a tool to mute the bells and whistles now that's actually something I'd like.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The submission is fair enough in its own way, but I can't say I'm overly impressed that it appears to be a direct advertisement for the submitter's product.
Blanket rules like only allowing sound from the visible tab are rather bad for things like internet radio, so being able to select tab by tab which should output sound and which shouldn't sounds great. It would be best if it were off by default so that you don't get spammed by audio ads.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
I have always wished there was a right-click menu on tabs to mute them. Seems like your extension has to use a bit of a kludge to silence them (has to "scan" tabs to detect plugins/etc. You'd have to update it everytime something new comes along, correct? And can it really tell if it is making a sound, or only if it could make a sound?) Handling that in browser should be much easier. Off hand, does anyone know how difficult it would be to get something like this integrated into core Firefox/Chrome?
Opera does have an option to disable sound in webpages, but I'm not sure if it works on Flash or not. I don't think so.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Apparently I'm the only person in the entire world who doesn't have their speakers turned on 24/7 because I never hear sounds.
Granted, I don't run Chrome, but regardless, every time I hear someone complaining about the sound from an ad on a web page I can't resist posing the rhetorical question, "You do realize you don't have to have your speakers turned on, don't you?"
This is another example of a solution looking for a problem.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"What does it say about society that if you advocate legalizing almost everything you'll be labelled a conservative?"
Well, in our society, it doesn't say anything. You seem to be confusing conservatives with libertarians.
In our society if you want the government to make laws restricting what people can do with or to their own bodies, but not regulate corporations in any way, you're a conservative.
If you want the government to regulate what corporations do, but not make laws about what you can do with or to your own body, you're a liberal.
If you don't want the government to regulate anything, for any reason, you're a libertarian.
Frankly, the problem is that all sound should be arbitrated by the browser, through the plugin interface. I should be able to flag by browser to never make a sound unless I turn it on, without having to mute my whole machine.
An Opera-Like Feature: A "By Site Preferences" addon/option!
That way, you can GLOBALLY set all:
---
1.) Addons
2.) Plugins
3.) IFrames-Frames
4.) Cookies
5.) Javascript/JAVA usage
---
OFF... & then only turn it on for the sites you absolutely NEED it running on!
* This would not only COMPLIMENT Chrome/Chromium's "sandbox" features for SAFETY, but also enhance the speed of rendering of pages to boot (Double-Bonus)...
Yes - I do the above in Opera, & it makes a HUGE difference in speed, & yes, SECURITY TOO, of websites I visit...
(Face it: MOST SITES DON'T REALLY NEED THAT STUFF RUNNING (certainly NOT "all the time/indiscriminately") TO FUNCTION PROPERLY!)...
APK
P.S.=> Just a thought for those of you that are Chrome/Chromium fans (Opera man here personally/mostly though), & are coders - that is, IF such a feature/addon does not exist for Chrome/Chromium, already... I know SanityInAnarchy (a member here who I know codes & likes Chrome) does, but I am NOT sure if he caught that comment of mine to he... some "Food 4 Thought"
... apk
Google's big-business is advertising. Anyone who works on an ad-blocking extension for Chrome will tell you that Google is very, _VERY_ slow to accept any sort of patches to WebKit that made ad-blocking more functional (currently an extension like NoScript for Firefox is practically impossible to implement in Chrome because Google will not patch, or accept patches to WebKit adding the required functionality). Anyone who is taking ads and hostile scripts seriously enough to warrant installing special software for it is using Firefox for two important reasons: Adblock Plus and NoScript.
Yeah and all those people who are listening to music while browsing are out of their minds and are only imagining that they have a problem, right?
You're missing the real story.
The real story is that a cool new addon is available for chrome, not FF.
Firefox was made by its addons. FF is just a bootloader for adblock+, noscript, firebug, flashblock, xmarks, and others.
If new addon development is going to Chrome, then I inevitably also have to move to Chrome. FF was fun and worked great, but...
Is there an equivalent for FF? Has Chrome's addons finally caught up with FF? That is the real story.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
not sure where the sound is coming from: http://i.qkme.me/5p2h.jpg (Futurama meme image, I swear)
Yea I really don't get this. I leave my laptop volume up, but I have *all* UI sounds turned off, flashblock takes care of the web autoplay bullshit. I can't stand coworkers chatty laptops, I don't think my laptop makes a peep (that isn't intentional through headphones) ever, weeks, months.
I fix this problem by muting the browser in Volume Mixer.
maybe an option to only allow audio out of the visible tab.
I use pandora/grooveshark/whatever in a background tab to listen to music all the time; having only the current tab emit sound would defeat that. But the ability to mute tabs (or have them muted by default, and be able to unmute them?) sounds perfect to me. Or how about having a whitelist of sites allowed to emit sound (somebody quick, grab the name NoSound to be a sister extension to NoScript).
It's comments like this that make me wish I had mod points today. So a virtual +1 \o/
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
If Chrome would give us enough freedom to get a NoScript equivalent working, this hack wouldn't be required.
And by turning your monitor off, you don't have to see obnoxious video advertisements, either.
BRILLIANT!
Which falls over when one is listening music through something like Last.fm or Pandora....in their browser.
Blocking all sound in background tabs would work for some people (if technically illiterate) those of us that use internet streaming for music, listening to videos while doing other things not so much. I like the idea someone presented about showing in the tab which ones are providing sound in them, I would welcome something like this along with a utility to mute the sound in individual tabs. I'm starting to get tired of having to sort through scripts and code that I can change to fix issues created by someone else deciding that they know how to manage my system better then me. I have found issues with windows 7 that Microsoft decided that all my "broken" links (over their arbitrary number of 4) on my desktop to files on my thumb drives do not need to be on the desktop and deletes them with no warning. I would hate for Chrome or FF to follow in the trend of that one of the reasons I switched was the addons allowing me to make changes to the browser that benefit me but it should be my choice.not the company providing the software.
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Have gnu, will travel.
Background tabs are hidden. There should be no video or audio or animation playing in them. This is especially annoying in Firefox where you can hide sets of tabs completely from view with Tab Groups (which is more like an extended bookmark functionality), but all those zombie tabs keep playing and gobbling memory and CPU. Limiting background animation to 1 fps and using the PageVisibility API are steps in the right direction, but they're not going far enough. Browsers should just freeze any tab that isn't visible.
But between flashblock and adblock, I can't remember the last time this was an issue.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
That's what my desktop at work is like, but I listen to music on my laptop while surfing all the time.
But this isn't a problem there because I use ClickToFlash (a flash blocker for Safari) so nothing gets to try to play audio that I don't authorize first. I can't remember the last time I ran into a midi file or some other way that sound was played without using flash.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Tough to notice Skype inbound calls otherwise.
Killing sound system-wide was fine twenty years ago as a reasonable solution.
But ads have been getting sneakier, where they delay before making their sales pitch. I have way too many browsers open to find it quickly.
Really, it seems to be the only time that it is a problem. I don't care for ads during my personal time.
your reading comprehension is rather poor if you think the antecedent for "it is usually liberals that do this" is anything like "make the loud and insistent claims that they are in favor of fewer laws and less restrictions on individuals". I was saying that liberals claim libertarians are conservatives
And your reading comprehension is bizarre. I said that conservatives are the ones who make the loud and insistent claims that they-- conservatives-- are in favor of fewer laws and less restrictions on individuals. They are hypocrites when they say this, because that is very explicitly not what they do.
However, explicit hypocrisy-- saying one thing and doing another-- doesn't seem to be anything you have any interest in pointing out.
Conservatives are not libertarians. Conservatives like to borrow libertarian rhetoric, but have no interest in actual libertarian principles.
This really seems like stuff that should be a built in browser preference: like maybe an option to only allow audio out of the visible tab.
^ This.
There's only a few sites I know I want sound from so that's video sites and a few music sites. So I'd like all sites muted unless I've white-listed them. I'm also fairly confident that 99.9% of other users feel the same. All those in agreement, shout, aye!
Addons that do this have been available for Firefox for a long time.
Is this one of those things where "everybody knows" the project release name is "purple pineapple" so that's the only way to find it by searching?
Or probably there must an absolutely awesome plugin doing exactly what you want, called "Mute Those Tab" and which supports all versions of Firefox between 2.x and 5.x
Sadly, the day before yesterday, Mozilla decided to bump up Firefox's version number from 6.x to 7.x, and by the time the plug-in author fixes this, Mozilla will have already bumped FF's version further (to 12.x !!!)
But you're still free to google around the web, until some obscure blog post explains how to hack the manifest.xml to have the plugin install onto all versions up until 99.x (= which is about next mont on Mozilla's time plan. About the same time when Microsoft makes a public announcement saying that they officially have started a workgroup tasked with considering the fact that maybe they will start committing to support modern standard and perhaps consider making Internet Explorer 11 (eta 2025) compliant with web standards such as HTML. Version 4).
~~~
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
>> currently an extension like NoScript for Firefox is practically impossible to implement in Chrome
Not true - see NotScripts: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/odjhifogjcknibkahlpidmdajjpkkcfn
Works very well.
I don't know of any ABP equivalents, there may not be any; I use Privoxy anyway, which is really a much more capable tool than ABP and does a lot more for the security and privacy conscious.
I vote based on politicians' actions, unless contrary to my preconceptions. Often wrong, never uncertain. #iamthe99%
While on the subject, I've noticed a lot of video advertisements (that you might see before playing a TV clip or something) will now pause automatically when the tab becomes inactive or the browser is minimized.
My trick of opening the page, then tabbing to something else to read while their advertisement plays in the background, no longer works. :(
No default play of audio or video without explicit opt-in. That should be a law.
I love it when everybody starts insulting each other's ability to read. Shall we start calling each other retards next?
I frequently save sessions, when each tab has a flash video player things can get quite hilarious. The whole system freezes trying to deal with the flash then everything starts playing at the same time. LOL! Just 1 video can already be annoying if you can not find it.
Great extension, keep on the good work harder.
What about the pop-up on top...?
... called NoScript. I would really like to see a NoScript for Chrome. Why hasn't one been created?
it doesn't show when I'm watching a movie.
...but in FF. I may have to finally switch, if Chrome can mirror FF's Panorama (Tab View) functionality as I am hopelessly addicted to having many, many tabs open at once, which is only palatable if I can group them and zoom out to see them all thumb-nailed.