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.

Comments

That sounds useful

[Geoffrey.landis]

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.

Re:That sounds useful

[JavaBear]

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.

Re:That sounds useful

[Hatta]

No, it really should be deny all, manually whitelist. What if you want to play audio from a website in the background? If it pauses when you switch tabs, that's no good. Or if you have more than one video embedded into one page. You don't want them to all start at once.

Is this the place?

[BrokenHalo]

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.

Re:Is this the place?

[iamhassi]

Agreed. While he's not charging for this extension and it is useful there are I'm sure hundreds of very useful Chrome extensions out there and /. is not the place to post all of them.

I'd also like to comment that I disagree with CmdrTaco (sorry!!) to add an option to only allow sound from the visible tab since I listened to internet radio and leave those running in a background tab.

Instead I would like there to be maybe a small speaker icon on the tab itself, perhaps on the right side next to the X, that would appear if there was sound coming from that tab. That I would find useful.

Choice is good

[ElectricTurtle]

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.

Re:Sound? What sound?

[FooBarWidget]

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?

Missing the real story

[vlm]

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.

Re:Missing the real story

[BZ]

Addons that do this have been available for Firefox for a long time.

Re:CHROME needs what I told SanityInAnarchy

[Anonymous Coward]

Random Camel Case and UPPER CASE, unnecessary bold type, an asterisk that doesn't have a reference, homemade ordered lists, fake section breaks, section breaks around a singular coherent sentence, parenthetical expressions that are standing alone, nested parenthetical expressions, a post script in a text editable field, and two sets of initials, all in an anonymous post? I think you've just scored some kind of award for the least visually appealing, non-troll post on Slashdot.

If there's one thing I hate ...

[PPH]

... its the p0rn sounds that continue to emanate from my PC when the boss approaches and I switch to a work related tab.