Slashdot Mirror
Google Chrome Getting Audio Indicators To Show You Noisy Tabs
An anonymous reader writes "Google is working on identifying Chrome tabs that are currently playing audio (or recording it). The feature is expected to show an audio animation if a tab is broadcasting or recording sound. François Beaufort spotted the new feature, a part of which is already available in the latest Chromium build."
This could actually be useful...hopefully FF will follow
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
21 Web Browser Features We Desperately Need
How long has this been in development again?
From TFA:
I hope they keep the indicator in the final builds, it will be useful for closing tabs with obnoxious sounds coming from them.
Wouldn’t it be more useful to have an option to mute all background tabs by default?
... which when selected would open full-size pop-ups of the tabbed page so you can view the entire page in a pop-up without selecting the tab and displaying the entire page. Is that a great idea or WHAT?! Google - are you listening? P.S. Google: I'm available for consulting work!
www.chihuahuarescue.com- Help to end dog abuse, abandonment and cruelty
I remember this being discussed on the FF bugzilla years ago. It was seen as a very good idea, but the issue was (at least then) that most audio is played by Flash applets which the browser can't control, thus making it useless in most scenarios. I wonder how Chrome tackles the issue of plugin content playing audio.
Quantum hacker.
This feature was listed as #21 in http://www.cracked.com/photoplasty_529_21-web-browser-features-we-desperately-need_p21/#21 - and, from all of them, the one is actually easy to implement. Hell, users have been wishing this kind of feature since before tabs even existed! I can only wonder what took so long for any dev team.
I hope Chrome gets this on the stable release ASAP, and Firefox and Opera follow suit, Explorer can go frack itself for all I care.
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
... implement a little 'penis symbol' so I know not to click that tab when someone else walks into the room?
There is nothing more sinister than having a single tab play questionable porn at maximum volume for the enjoyment of everybody around you.
How about also DISABLING/muting audio in all inactive tabs?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
the one is actually easy to implement
For HTML5 audio/video, yes. For Flash/Silverlight, not necessarily.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
the one is actually easy to implement
For HTML5 audio/video, yes. For Flash/Silverlight, not necessarily.
Considering most of the others are DWIM in nature, or at least require almost an AI working inside the browser, I'd say they're easy. :-D
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
For HTML5 stuff this should be a cakewalk. But for plugin content, they are separate processes that route audio directly to the OS/driver system, not the browser. Therefore the browser has little to no control over them.
Silence is a state of mime.
15 years ago??
I don't know that I have ever encountered such a site. Not that one couldn't exist, but I've never seen one. What am I missing out on?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Excellent!
Good to see things get more awesome over time. Good to see good innovation.
Now all Google has to add is the hunt-down-and-do-violence-to-their-person button to find the designers who thought that music on opening was a good idea in the first place.
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
This would be a step in the right direction, but I wish website designers would stop the practice of having videos and audio clips play automatically when you load the page, without warning (it almost jolts me out of my chair every time). And the audio mute button next to the video isn't good enough, not after it's already scared the bejesus out of you.
Care to elaborate? Seems like an useful feature which is nice to discuss about.
Ik i Choose to play a video. manually, in focus.i MIGHT want to hear the sound. In that case i do not want to check
-video sound setting
-Tab sound setting.
-browser sound setting.
-global sound setting.
(it gets worse when playing in a remote virtual machine )
I never ever want to hear sounds in ads. That is the second most important reason that i invest too much time in ad-blocking.
Personally I'd like to have _all_ activity (audio, network, CPU, everything) stopped on every tab except the active one. If I want to be annoyed I can pop the tab into it's own window (or if someone cares to implement it - you could have per-tab controls).
#exclude <ms/windows.h>
Until they bring back side tabs, or let addon authors modify the UI to accommodate their own, a lot of us don't give a crap about Chrome.
Obviously there is a need for this, given that it is being added to the software and the support shown for it in the comments here... but why?
The only time my tabs make noise is when I specifically tell them to.
I go to YouTube. I start the movie, it makes noise. Until I press play, it's nice and quiet.
I go to Pandora. I start my playlist. It plays music. But until I press play, it's nice and quiet.
I go to some random flash game. I press play. The game makes beeps and bleeps. But until I press play, it's nice and quiet.
Where do people go that a website starts making sounds automatically?
I'm not trying to be facetious; honestly, I can't think of a single time that has happened to me.
Do you really think there's an API for asking a plugin if it's playing audio? And if there is, do you think the plugin will always tell the truth?
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
Use ptrace to detect the plugin accessing the audio device?
I'd much rather see which tabs are taking CPU and other resources instead of audio. Sometimes I have to kill all my tabs one at a time to figure out which one was running some runaway JavaScript.
It is highly annoying to be in a meeting and have your laptop decide that now is the time to play that flash animation that it couldn't get previously. If you keep a lot of tabs open (as I do) it can be very frustrating to find the one that is doing the deed. This feature might even get me using chrome more than I do now.
Why doesn't this feature exist as an extension? It looks like there are already a few extensions that do this and more, they're just still in development and slightly buggy.
In Soviet Russia, dot slashes YOU!
Glad I wasn't the only one to think about that Cracked article when I saw the headline. I wrote in the comments there at the time - that that request was the odd man out. The rest were obvious jokes, requesting that the computer read your mind, time-travel, break the laws of physics, murder people, etc., but that one seemed completely reasonable, and should really actually be implemented. Now here we are, Chrome is doing it - wonder if they got the idea from the Cracked article. :)
(I do also hope it gets into Firefox, but everyone knows the Firefox dev team doesn't actually add features people -want- anymore...)
I just wish they would let diverted links (from outlook, RSS Readers, etc) open in chrome with the program itself remaining in the background. It is common for me to use an RSS reader, click on a dozen or so links, and then flip over to the browser and read them one by one. Now I have to flip back to the RSS reader after I click each link because chrome jumps to the foreground. It was even more annoying when these noisy tabs start talking in the background while reading other stuff before I installed flashblock. To me this is my biggest wish for chrome, especially since I could do this in FF probably 5+ years ago.
Where's ptrace on Windows?
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
You might have multiple Chrome windows open, and it would be harder to identify which window has sounds coming from it.
Even with AdBlock and the don't autoplay flash plugin, there are still occasionally pages that start playing something. And the three things they all seem to have in common are: really bad music, really loud, bad music, and they only seem to show up when you've loaded ten or more pages in the background.
MuteTab tries to keep the volume down, or off, on other tabs, but there's only so much they can do with a plugin.
Just hijack all the OS API calls for the plugin (doesn't Chrome do it anyway for Flash, by the way?).
Tab CPU usage indicators / throttling would be very nice too - up/down bandwidth and memory as well, but CPU is perhaps the most important thing after sound volume. Of course you can find this information elsewhere (about:memory), but that takes extra effort and you have to know to look. It could be some sort of horizontal percentage bars across the tab, with an info popup onmouseover, and clicking would let you slide the limit indicator (i.e. per-tab memory quotas, maximum volume, connection throttling, and CPU throttling).
Without such feedback and controls, it would be easy for a site to (for example) mint Bitcoins for itself via JavaScript at your CPU's expense, without your knowledge or consent...
--libman