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Chrome Extension Helps Find Noisy Tabs

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the where-have-you-been-all-my-life dept.

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.

3 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Is this the place? by BrokenHalo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Choice is good by ElectricTurtle · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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  3. Re:That sounds useful by JavaBear · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.