YouTube Adds Play Icon To Page Titles To Show Which Tabs Are Making Noise

An anonymous reader writes "YouTube has added a new play icon to its video pages that only appears when content is playing. The icon disappears when you hit pause, allowing you to quickly see which tabs are making noise. The new feature is a very minor tweak that will be very useful for YouTube users. Because the service auto-plays content when you open a video, if you have multiple YouTube tabs it is often tedious to figure out which ones need to be paused or closed."

Comments

Plug

[Anonymous Coward]

See also: You Tube Options for chrome (and possibly other borswers?) It allows you to totally stop autoplay, and has those tab icons already in there - one for videos which are playing, another showing which are paused.

There's a bunch of other options in there in addition, just wanted to call those two out in particular.

Belong in the browser, maybe?

[grasshoppa]

Seems to me that the browser should offer visual alert as to which tab is makin' noise, and should give you tweakin' options ( such as mute all tabs but currently focused tab, allow unmuting of tab via right click on tab, ect... ).

It's great that youtube is doing this, don't misunderstand me. But it seems to be making up for the lack of options in the browser.

Re:Belong in the browser, maybe?

[Mr Thinly Sliced]

Re:Belong in the browser, maybe?

If the Redhat guys have taught me anything it's that it belongs in systemd.

Re:Belong in the browser, maybe?

[wonkey_monkey]

I was under the impression that the browser couldn't know whether a plugin (i.e., Flash) is making noise.

Re:Belong in the browser, maybe?

[icebraining]

Yes, but that would need Adobe to implement such a feature, and why would they?

Re: Belong in the browser, maybe?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your gut is way off. People put music on YouTube in the background all the time.

Re:Belong in the browser, maybe?

[mysidia]

Seems to me that the browser should offer visual alert as to which tab is makin' noise, and should give you tweakin' options

Not only that... but unless it's a trusted site or 'safe site' set by me; I want all sites muted by default.

The problem is that plenty of the time, some random site i'm visiting will bring up some 'ad video' and start playing things on my speakers without my consent. Also some webmasters with questionable design aesthetics will create annoying background music.

Background music on some random site starting at some random time unexpectedly on some background tab is no good, when I have 20 tabs open.

Re:Belong in the browser, maybe?

[tepples]

for external code loaded into the browser process, ask the OS's sound API about the process's settings

That'd depend on there being functionality in the operating system to 1. enumerate open audio streams, and 2. track an audio stream back to something associated with the plugin's assigned drawing surface.

Re:Belong in the browser, maybe?

[Rob the Bold]

Yes, but that would need Adobe to implement such a feature, and why would they?

Because if something becomes sufficiently annoying, the cost of co-workers/spouses/roommates/bosses/etc. getting annoyed with you and your flash-web-ads blaring will exceed the benefit of using it for the purposes you want it for.

Re:Belong in the browser, maybe?

[BitZtream]

Chrome uses its own flash player developed by Google, it can interact however they want it to.

Re: Belong in the browser, maybe?

[quacking duck]

It would've been easier for sites not to invoke multiple popup and pop-under windows with ads in each of them. But that's what many sites did, it got so annoying that popup blocking plugins were made to prevent this, and then blocking functionality was built into the browsers themselves.

So there's definitely precedent.

Why not just fix the autoplay?

[dbIII]

Why not just fix the autoplay?

Re:Why not just fix the autoplay?

[MrL0G1C]

Because less Adverts shown = less money for google.

Someonr needs to write a plugin that stops auto-redirects based on a site blacklist, I hate when I watch a video and then want to read the comments and find the page redirecting to some other video.

Noscript

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

= no autoplay

Focus on the Video

[tuppe666]

Ignoring the whole Google+ war on facebook which is a larger topic in itself, and maybe a more interesting one(Google+ si growing vs The numbers are a lie). I would have hoped for real support for VP9 already, wasn't that the point already, Google own the codec and the largest browser share (paying firefox a few dollers too), and right now VP9 is the best quality codec. I would love a purge of low quality duplicate content with a merge of comments, and lyrics videos should become .kar files. The feature mentioned is a a welcome touch...but its simply that a touch. How about focus ion the higher quality video.

old problem

[Black Parrot]

I haven't had that problem, with youtube or a great number of other sites, for quite a while. For two reasons:

1) disallow scripting by default, stops a lot of autoplay.

2) sometime in the last couple of years Firefox quit trying to load every tab when you reload a saved session. For each window, it only loads the "active" tab, and leaves the other tabbed pages blank unless/until you select their tab.

The second also stopped the internet choke you used to get when you restarted a session and it tried to load several hundred pages at the same time. Hurray for progress!

News?

[PerformanceDude]

And this minor usability improvement on Youtube made the Slashdot front page why?????

Is this really "News that matters"?

Seriously?????

Re:News?

[OhANameWhatName]

No????? not????? seriously????? but????? outrageously!!!!!

Even better

[Cant use a slash wtf]

A mind-blowing concept that doesn't seem to exist in the default form of any browser I have come across; only in a few extensions and add-ons that don't always work exactly how I would like them to.
The ability to individually mute tabs. I'm no expert in browser-progamming, but surely if Chrome can have a separate process for each tab, muting individual tabs can't be much of a stretch. Every time I open up a range of tabs, with one having a stupid auto-playing video, I have to look through every single tab to find it.
Worse still if I have a flash game open in one tab (I know, I know, 'too old for flash games') that doesn't have a mute option I can't just mute that tab if I want it to temporarily shutup while I watch a video in another tab. Forget hover-boards, where is my tab-muting? It's 2013!

Re: Security hole?

[vux984]

So now Google is sending over code to my computer saying in addition to playing a video, my tabs should blink

This ability to change the title is something that any javascript enabled page has been able to do since the dawn of javascript.

How is that code being sent?

OMG, your right, and I just noticed that when you use gmail and go from your inbox to a message it puts the subject of the selected message into the page title, and it does this without loading a whole new page... OMG OMG ...how is this done its keylogging when i click on a message and code from a server something something... MITM vulnerability just waiting to happen... oh noes my bank infos...

Stupid troll.

Flashblock

[palemantle]

Flashblock (extension for Firefox and possibly other browsers) is particularly convenient to stop auto-play and start when necessary. Any decent script blocker will take care of this as others have pointed out.

Re:Flashblock

[pla]

This.

Thanks to Flashblock, I never wonder which tab has started making noise, because none of them do unless I manually tell them to start playing Flash.

FireFox actually has similar content built in as a config option, but unlike Flashblock, the stock click-to-play feature seems to break a lot of sites (I think it works by not even loading the plugin, so if the page uses a script to detect your browser's capabilities, they report that you don't have Flash and give up).

Now fix the fullscreen bug

[Blaskowicz]

Lately the controls have been sliding out incorrectly when going full screen, the top of the time bar stays visible and functional.
I can't get the bar back with mouse over so I have to exit full screen mode to change sound. I can trick it to stay up by mousing over before it half disappears, or try going back and forth between window and full screen.

This happened when I switch to Opera (12.16) but back on Firefox (22) the bug is there so it must have been a coincidence and Google updated their code. It's running on Flash 12.2, because that's all that is available. I have a feeling Google doesn't test their stuff on 12.2, as there was some other breakage before : the obnoxious sound volume control bug, which would deafen you at 100% volume, after you unmuted, after you muted by error / because of the bug of the auto-hide slider that didn't pop out on mouse over.

I don't have or use an OS or browser with Flash 15 or 16 or whatever it is to know how it behaves. I even want to believe it's a conspiracy to make me move to Chrome or Windows but that's probably just bad support. Chromium seemed to use system-wide flash by default on my OS, by the way. I still prefer flash to html5 video somehow (or worse, stumbling on a raw file randomly opened by totem or mplayer plugin).

Videos intentionally not available on mobile

[tepples]

I believe that's up to the publisher of each video. Nothing implements HTML5 DRM yet. Everything with Flash implements Flash DRM. And I'm under the impression that for certain premium videos, YouTube refuses to show the video unless it can enforce ad playback. I've seen notices to the effect "You must install Flash Player" on several YouTube videos on PC, and "The content owner has not made this video available on mobile" on my Nexus 7 tablet.

Re: Videos intentionally not available on mobile

[quacking duck]

Never mind premium videos, I don't have Flash installed on my computer but YouTube has started refusing to automatically serve HTML5 versions on an increasingly large percentage of videos, none of which come close to qualifying as premium content.

Fortunately there are a few browser extensions which take care of that and force load the html5 versions, though they need to be kept updated in a cat-and-mouse game with google as they try blocking them. In an older version of one such extension, HTML5 video will actually load and start playing before some CSS and JavaScript overlays the video and blocks the audio, then blatantly lies with a bullshit error claiming Flash is required.

Mozilla bug 516752

[tepples]

or an object handled by the sound API in case the noise is generated from within the calling process.

I found "the sound API" in your comment ambiguous. Did you mean by the browser's sound API or by the operating system's sound API? The NPAPI architecture allows to shortcut the browser's sound API and directly call that of operating system's, and the latter may not enforce association of an audio stream with a window or subwindow.

If you meant the operating system's sound API, the browser knows which process it's coming from. But using the process to identify a tab that plays audio would require all browsers to adopt a process per tab, and I'm not aware of any browser other than Chromium that consistently uses a process per tab. YouTube has implemented the feature described in the article as a workaround for the fact that not everybody is able to switch to Google Chrome or another Chromium browser. If you want this implemented in browsers other than Chromium, join me in voting for bug 516752.