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Google Chrome Getting Audio Indicators To Show You Noisy Tabs

Posted by Unknown on from the mumbling-in-dutch dept.

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."

44 of 155 comments (clear)

  1. Good idea by swinferno · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This could actually be useful...hopefully FF will follow

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    1. Re:Good idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Better yet, each tab should have an individual "mute" button, enabled by default. Nothing makes me close a tab quicker than unwanted noise.

    2. Re:Good idea by rainmouse · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Im glad they came up with this rather than having Apple patent it.

    3. Re:Good idea by mwvdlee · · Score: 5, Interesting

      How about muting all tabs except the one currently open with the option of enabling/disabling any tab explicitely?

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    4. Re:Good idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      I think this is the only reasonable solution...

      If I open 20 tabs, I don't want to mute 10. I just only want the current one...

      and I would love a mute button for the current one...

    5. Re:Good idea by cbiltcliffe · · Score: 3, Funny

      Don't worry, Apple's probably going to patent it, anyway.

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    6. Re:Good idea by ikaruga · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    7. Re:Good idea by psiclops · · Score: 2

      so unmute them.

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    8. Re:Good idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      What part of "with the option of enabling/disabling any tab explicitly" is it you don't understand?
      Or is this some kind of weird I-have-a-five-digit-user-id-so-i-don't-even-have-to-read-comments-HURR-DURR thingy?

    9. Re:Good idea by smittyoneeach · · Score: 5, Funny

      Thanks for making it harder for me to mix Beethoven and Lady GaGa, you insensitive clod.
      Da-Da-Da-DUHHHHH. . .'Pa-Pa-Pa-Poker Face'

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    10. Re:Good idea by Karl+Cocknozzle · · Score: 3

      How about muting all tabs except the one currently open with the option of enabling/disabling any tab explicitely?

      I like this, but the problem I see is the unexpected suddenly blast of noise when you switch tabs--if the irritating people who use sound on their web-site to grab your attention know most browsers are "muted by default" their tendency will be to have a constantly looping message playing (braying) at maximum volume so that if you switch to that tab you almost certainly hear the message. Or they'll figure out how to discern if their tab is "muted" and wait to start the noise until you shift focus to that page and "unmute" it.

      All things considered, it seems unfortunate that web-developers can't just get the message: "NO WE DON'T WANT TO HEAR YOUR FUCKING NOISE!"

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      Who did what now?
    11. Re:Good idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      First hit when doing a Google search, have you tried http://www.mutetab.com/

    12. Re:Good idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think the point is, all unselected tabs are muted by default, but you can selectively unmute them.

    13. Re:Good idea by fragfoo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I find these ideas awesome, another thing browsers could is to color code tabs by cpu/memory usage or something. So you know which tab is slowing you down.

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    14. Re:Good idea by mbstone · · Score: 4, Interesting

      How about identifying noisy websites in Google search results?

    15. Re:Good idea by Your.Master · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    16. Re:Good idea by Eraesr · · Score: 4, Informative

      Good point. Also, after I posted my message I clicked one of the links in the article and found that so far it appears to work only for the HTML5 version of YouTube, which makes me believe that this only works for HTML5 controls, which means that annoying flash ads with sound can still creep through.

    17. Re:Good idea by smittyoneeach · · Score: 2

      Whats the word for Un-eureka?

      I'd say reversing it, akerue, but you might get flattened by a turning ox.

      --
      Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
    18. Re: Good idea by cynyr · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I assume that there would be a whitelist "allows allow tabs at these sites to play sounds" sort of a thing.

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    19. Re:Good idea by jones_supa · · Score: 3, Informative

      IE10 does exactly that. If you open YouTube videos to background tabs, they won't start playing until you activate the tab.

      For Firefox, I recommend installing the Flashblock addon, which allows you to start Flash plugins manually by clicking them.

    20. Re:Good idea by wvmarle · · Score: 2

      I have that add-on, but YouTube is one of the very few sites that is on my allowed list as that's a site where flash is actually functional (yes, you read that correctly, "flash" and "functional" in one sentence). I got bored with having to click every time...

      Ideal for YouTube would be that the video would start loading (buffering) but not playing when the tab is in the background, so when I get to watch it, it's ready to go.

    21. Re:Good idea by devman · · Score: 2

      Chromium runs each tab as a separate process. It is easy to identify which processes are using audio.

      In Linux you can easily identify individual Chromium tabs using sound by using `lsof | grep snd` . Try it. Open bunch of slashdot tabs and then open one youtube tab and play a video with sound then kill that PID, it should only kill the youtube video.

    22. Re:Good idea by geminidomino · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    23. Re:Good idea by P-niiice · · Score: 2

      Stop looking at so many cam sites dude. you only need one.

    24. Re:Good idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Yes, here we say "Mod parent up" :-)

    25. Re:Good idea by v1 · · Score: 2

      I agree with this approach. But I can think of two examples of when I would like to get sound from an inactive tab.

      1. when doing those LivePerson chats, that chime when a person replies. They can take minutes to respond sometimes, and I'm frequently off in another tab or window or even another app entirely and need to hear the alert lest I get the "hello? are you there? since you're no longer responding I'm hanging up" and cost me another 20 minutes getting through queue again.

      2. I frequently open a series of tabs with videos, and when I hear one start I know it's done buffering and switch to it. So I like to hear when it starts, but it'd be nice to have a sound icon in the tab to see WHICH page has finished loading.

      So I think rather than a "frontmost only", I would prefer just an icon on the tab indicating what page is making noise. And make it clickable, to toggle mute for that tab. In safari, when you mouseover a tab, it unhides a [x] on the left side so you can close a tab without selecting it. Just add a [>] speaker box on the right side if the page has a sound element.

      Nothing more annoying than getting ambushed by one of those lovely flash ads that starts babbling while you're trying to listen to music. Or just plain won't shut up and no idea where it's coming from and have to close tabs and windows until to gets quiet. And then try to remember what tab it was you just closed, so next time you open it you can deal with it.

      --
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  2. Coincidence? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    21 Web Browser Features We Desperately Need

    How long has this been in development again?

    1. Re:Coincidence? by ElementOfDestruction · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Coincidence? by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 2

      #22 AUTO DISABELE AUTO ADVANCE on slideshow.

      It does me no good as the page advances 1s after it slowly loads. No, I couldn't find a toggle, thanks for asking.

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    3. Re:Coincidence? by istartedi · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

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    4. Re:Coincidence? by Baloroth · · Score: 2

      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.

      See the "Article View" up on the right side of the page? Yeah, that works for Cracked. Other sites, YMMV. Usually they have a "print page" link that does the trick, but not always.

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  3. Not just for memory management by cpicon92 · · Score: 2

    From TFA:

    Google Chrome Team is working on identifying tabs that play audio in order to exclude them from the list of tabs to discard when memory runs out.

    I hope they keep the indicator in the final builds, it will be useful for closing tabs with obnoxious sounds coming from them.

    1. Re:Not just for memory management by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 5, Informative

      (Slightly OT) Like Slashdot? Not sure what was up yesterday, but I kept getting a (Swedish) ad on this site, one that expanded by itself even without rolling over it, and played video with (loud) audio. Great fun when idly browsing ./ during a conference call.

      I thought advertisers wised up about doing that that sort of thing in the last decade. Suffice to say I finally disabled ads on ./

      --
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  4. Flash and plugin sounds by etnoy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    Quantum hacker.
    1. Re:Flash and plugin sounds by slart42 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      Chrome uses it's own build of the flash plugin, which is not using the NPAPI plugin API, but Google's own Pepper API, which has support for Audio built into the API - and thus will handle playback of the audio through the browser, so the browser has full knowlegde and control of the audio.

  5. Re:Why are there noisy tabs at all? by tofarr · · Score: 2

    A lot of people open music playlists on youtube / music sites and play them as background tabs - muting background tabs by default would annoy these people. (Unless there was some kind of white list you could add them to - but maybe that is overcomplicating the situation...)

  6. This has been on the wish list for a loooooong tim by mfarah · · Score: 2

    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.

    --
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  7. Can they also... by dohzer · · Score: 2

    ... implement a little 'penis symbol' so I know not to click that tab when someone else walks into the room?

  8. even better by smash · · Score: 4

    How about also DISABLING/muting audio in all inactive tabs?

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  9. A website that records sound? by damn_registrars · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    --
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  10. Stop the automatic videos and audio clips! by ebinrock · · Score: 2

    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.

  11. Mute all unless unmuted... by leuk_he · · Score: 2

    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.

  12. Show me CPU utilization Instead by elabs · · Score: 2

    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.

  13. Thank you, Jeebus! by kwiqsilver · · Score: 2

    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.