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."
Better yet, each tab should have an individual "mute" button, enabled by default. Nothing makes me close a tab quicker than unwanted noise.
Im glad they came up with this rather than having Apple patent it.
Useful? What an understatement. This feature is could potentially being a life saver for the porn addicts browsing websites that open multiple tabs with video/chat feeds in the background.
I think the point is, all unselected tabs are muted by default, but you can selectively unmute them.
Longer than 6 days I would bet.
What they need is a fix to rid the world of all of these ridiculous, horrible "Slideshow" websites. 21 fixes? OK Give me a list on one page - maybe two if you want to increase your ad revenue. There's not much in Web 3.0 or whatever the fuck we call ourselves on, but it's horseshit.
The part where you explain how selective unmuting isn't a huge pain in the ass? Whatever selective unmuting UI is created will have to be something fiddly, since background tabs don't have a lot of screen real estate and all the mouse buttons are allocated.
Myself, I'd adapt by dragging those tabs into a new window, rather than fiddling with some control. Still, I think for a general audience, selective muting will be way more palatable than selective unmuting*. As a user, I don't expect Pandora to mute when I switch tabs and I also don't expect there to exist an "unmute" button, anymore than I expect it to mute when I minimize an application, or hit alt-tab, or something like that.
With that said, tablets are causing people to adapt their expectations. I think that pisses people off fairly often, though.
* you might even be able to justify having some buried config option for mute-by-default for those really desperate for that behaviour.
I assume that there would be a whitelist "allows allow tabs at these sites to play sounds" sort of a thing.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
Even easier: Make the "indicator" they're adding into a toggle. Then it's a complete non-issue on "quiet" tabs, it's not buried in a context menu, and it works just like the one on phones, tablets, and the various other gadgets-for-the-ui-impaired that are so popular now.
That would have looked better if my browser had "turn slide show into one page" and "automatically unpaginate pages without forcing you to hunt for printer icon". On the other end of that spectrum we need, "turn disk thrashing page archives and continuous scrollers into paginated pages". Seriously.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?