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
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
Sounds like you actually want a step further. You want your OS to block sound from certain apps, unless you give them permission. Which should be totally do-able.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
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
I'm not confusing libertarians with conservatives, I'm saying that other people do, hence the use of 'labelled'. And as your breakdown implies, it is usually liberals that do this, because they are just as bigoted as 'conservatives' in the end and only believe in freedom for some, not all. My sig is a critique of liberal hypocrisy.
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
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).
I saw that meme the other day and thought "someone should create an addon showing which tabs are making sound". Then this appears.
Just call me Paranoid Parrot.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
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
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."
Corporations are run by and employ people, and it is their freedom which is compromised. A person does not (or should not have to) give up their rights, citizenship, and personhood just because they own a business, and if many liberals had their way this is exactly what would happen. They advocate censoring business owners and their interests just because they don't like their political influence. Well, it's not really freedom of speech if that freedom suddenly evaporates for business owners.
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
Have gnu, will travel.
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?
Liberals are a subset of society. What they label society by extension also labels, if only in part. There is no contradiction.
Further, 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 because they (libertarians) believe in the same freedoms that conservatives do, while denying the restrictions that conservatives also desire, which would be in line with 'liberalism' so it is invisible to liberals who (although rightly) think such a perspective is only natural.
I'm not particularly calling out conservatives because the very nature of conservatives, the definition of the word, is the resistance to change and the preservation of old order/status quo. It would be rather silly to criticize them for doing their stated goal. Yes, all the blather from the right about liberty and freedom seems to only apply to people who live like Ward and June Cleaver, but considering that they make no secret that their framework for liberty and freedom is 'traditional values' which is philosophically coherent and consistent with the goals implicit in a movement labelled 'conservative'.
Liberals are much more hypocritical because they are supposed to oppose status quo systems and advocate for freedom from tradition for its own sake. They do this right up until it becomes about freedom for business owners, and then everything comes to a screeching halt. For some reason business owners are not people, and their rights, property, and lives are to be subjected to nearly any whim of the majority by way of the whole power of the state. If they could they would silence them, rob from them, dictate to them everything they should do and not do, all because they have obviously forfeited their humanity by daring to contribute to the economy by running a business.
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
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.
The problem with your proposal is that applications themselves act as mixers. If you block sound from an application, you block all sources of sound within that application. In order to keep Internet radio going in one tab while blocking ads in another, you have to put the control within the application.
I like to play kakuro while I watch (mostly listen to) the news in the morning. Muting all background tabs would make that more difficult. I would prefer having the option to mute all or some background tabs, or perhaps have a "whitelist" of sites allowed to make noise in the background.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Because businesses like BP and Union Carbide and Enron and Goldman Sachs and Lehman Bros and Countrywide and Roche and Wellpoint and Halliburton and the United Fruit Company and Ford (1914 ethical standards enforcement) and Wal-Mart and IBM (Nazi tech support etc.) are such great examples of corporate citizenship and exercising of their rights. Wouldn't want to infringe on their freedom to maim!
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
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%
Given that all modern OSes abstract hardware access, you're right, this should be totally doable.
For what it's worth, Windows 7 lets you control sound volume on a per-application basis--even muting whole applications, if that be your wish. Doesn't help with tabbed applications like browsers, though, where you might want to let some tabs play by not others. A finer level of granularity would be useful here, built into the browser itself.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
No default play of audio or video without explicit opt-in. That should be a law.
... 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.