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.
Of all the "new" things they add to the browsers, this is the one thing that would make all but the most annoying advertisers happy.
Another pair of must have features would be "Pause all scripts on background tabs" with sub options for types such as JavaScript, Flash, Audio and Video, and "throttle priority for background tabs" to limit the impact of for instance Javascript while you open a number of pages. These tabs have plenty of time to load while you read the others.