Firefox Will Soon Show You Which Tabs Are Making Noise, and Let You Mute Them

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla is working on identifying Firefox tabs that are currently playing audio. The feature will show an icon if a tab is making sounds and let the user mute the playback. It's worth noting that while Chrome has had audio indicators for more than a year now, it still doesn't let you easily mute tabs. The option is available in Google's browser, but it's not enabled by default (you have to turn on the #enable-tab-audio-muting flag in chrome://flags/).

Comments

Finally!

[weilawei]

Something approximating a useful feature!

Re:Finally!

[JMJimmy]

Indeed. Now if we could only get CPU/RAM usage as well!

Re:Finally!

[bondsbw]

And kudos to subby for pointing out the way to do it in Chrome... didn't realize it was there.

Re:Finally!

[Billly Gates]

Keep in mind Chrome had this .... then advertisers disabled it :-(

I tried a system without adblock and it was astounding what these guys do these days. Website redirects, 15 second commercials you can't close, etc.

My fear is as flash dies HTML 5 will make blocking this harder if they can hack and disable muting

Re:Finally!

[alvinrod]

For a long time I didn't mind having ads enabled on Slashdot as they tended to behave well, but recently they've been beyond annoying. They make noise and eat inordinate amounts of CPU time for no purpose. When will advertisers realize it's better to make a simple ad that's respectful to the audience than to make one that no one will ever care to look at? I don't doubt that they can get by fine in general when advertising to the unwashed masses, but this is a tech site and the users are no strangers to ad-blocking plug-ins or other means of never viewing their content.

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

>Now if we could only get CPU/RAM usage as well!

On a related note, show the CPU use of scripting, and allow temporary enabling of scripting on a per tab basis (but block third party and hidden https calls in the scripting like the gew-gal code)

There seem to be other problems related to html5 features, like why, even with scripting of and no video playback, do some LA Times pages that contain videos eat gobs of CPU?

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

Even more useful would be auto-mute all new tabs.

Re:Finally!

[Billly Gates]

For a long time I didn't mind having ads enabled on Slashdot as they tended to behave well, but recently they've been beyond annoying. They make noise and eat inordinate amounts of CPU time for no purpose. When will advertisers realize it's better to make a simple ad that's respectful to the audience than to make one that no one will ever care to look at? I don't doubt that they can get by fine in general when advertising to the unwashed masses, but this is a tech site and the users are no strangers to ad-blocking plug-ins or other means of never viewing their content.

Which is why I use adblock plus. Slashdot gets paid still by ethical ads with guidelines that must be met and will lose money when these clowns get blocked. I still get 3 ad networks blocked as of right now with adblock. If Slashdot wants more money replace them with ethical ads and VIOLA.

So to me this is the perfect solution so we can have some free stuff and profitability goes down for the unethical ones

Re:Finally!

[weilawei]

If Slashdot wants more money replace them with ethical ads and VIOLA.

I prefer violin.

Re:Finally!

[Fortran IV]

I'll take either as long as the audio stays muted.

Re:Finally!

[Fortran IV]

Now if we could only get CPU/RAM usage as well!

Exactly what I came to say. I'd love to be able tell which tabs are pushing FF over 2GB, or carpet-bombing my CPUs when they auto-refresh, without having to close them all one by one.

Re:Finally!

[tlhIngan]

Keep in mind Chrome had this .... then advertisers disabled it :-(

I tried a system without adblock and it was astounding what these guys do these days. Website redirects, 15 second commercials you can't close, etc.

My fear is as flash dies HTML 5 will make blocking this harder if they can hack and disable muting

Then you switch to a browser that lets you do that. That's the cool thing with HTML5 - if one vendor refuses to make their browser work for you, you move on. Whereas if it was flash, then they all are broken in the same way.

I went across a website that did that - it did popups and alertboxes and played a sound. And the alertbox was triggered on closing, making it nigh impossible to close the window. Then I noticed a "suppress further alerts" checkbox, which made it simple to close the tab.

Do it in flash and the only way is to kill the process.

Re:Finally!

[rwa2]

Yeah, I'm happy enough just closing any tab that starts sprouting unsolicited audio, either from ads or actual content that autoplays. Unfortunately, I doubt most web analytics do a good job showing people leaving their site in droves once some autoplay content starts.

Slashdot might be a good example of this, though... I used to leave /. running in a tab all day long, but now I usually end up closing it after something autoplays nowadays and not going back. Maybe someone noticed, because I do see autoplay junk hit the page slightly less often now.

Facebook oddly enough actually has a pretty nice system where videos autoplay muted as you scroll by them, pause once they're offscreen, unless you unmute or hit play. It would be nice to be able to give better reasons for blocking content, though, like "This link was a useless slideshow" or "The page had some stupid autoplay thing"

Re:Finally!

[Feanturi]

We already get lots of that.

Re:Finally!

[ckatko]

I've been using it for so long I didn't realize it was a special feature in Chrome.

Re:Finally!

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Indeed. Now if we could only get CPU/RAM usage as well!

Yes, yes, YES. Firefox slowly eats/leaks memory until it's using more than 3.5Gb on my machine...and then everything slows down, images don't load, etc etc. Yes, fix the damn memory issue before doing anything else.

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to: about:memory

But don't expect it to help much. It tells me FF the browser itself is very bloated and the JavaScript engine doesn't let go of things. Even if I close a lot of tabs (like 50, each containing at least one 1MB image) and use the free memory buttons, the total memory usage barely changes. You could argue FF is holding onto those images in case I browse back to those sites. Ok I guess, but it should drop them when I tell it to free up memory. I don't care if it's only holding caches or not, when it gets near 4GB the browser becomes unstable and very slow*. Sometimes it successfully starts swapping, the rest of the time it crashes.

*WTF is with the slow down when memory usage increases? Are all the internal algorithms doing linear array searches or something?The time to open a new tab should be constant whether you already have 2 tabs open or 1000.

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why worry? Some 19 year old the ther day invented a new CPU that will solve everything.

Re:Finally!

[DeVilla]

Then for the trifecta, could we get a way to detect and prevent rebinding of standard keys?

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

There are ads on /.? Wait, let me disable Alblock Plus...

Re:Finally!

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Umm... you could just not let Flash play. That's easier than using an automated method designed to avoid bad behavior in a Turing Complete language autorun natively.

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

And something that should have been implemented the day after multi-tabbed browsing and in-browser audio were both possible.

Better yet, auto-playing media should never have been implemented in any browser.

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

>The time to open a new tab should be constant whether you already have 2 tabs open or 1000.

Um, not if you have 1000 tabs doing other shit in the background. But then it might get a bit better once they split the UI thread into its own process as part of their Electrolysis effort.

Re:Finally!

[JMJimmy]

Then for the trifecta, could we get a way to detect and prevent rebinding of standard keys?

Didn't you know? That's a "feature".

Re: Finally!

[Redbehrend]

Didn't Chrome do this like 2 years ago?

Re:Finally!

[Seferino]

Yep, I'm working on it. Firefox Nightly should have a usable display of CPU by the end of August. Memory usage is planned, but I have many other things to do first.

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

true dat, late by a year at least...

Re:Finally!

[Seferino]

That's not planned for the moment, but with PreferenceStats.jsm (currently in Firefox Nightly), it is already possible to write an add-on that does monitors each tab. Firefox doesn't have a feature for stopping all scripts in a page yet (that's https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s..., if you're curious), but reloading the tab without scripts (or other features) shouldn't be too hard.

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you very much. It will help laptop usage a lot. It is so annoying to close tabs one by one to find the page with javascript crap which causes the laptop fan to spin.

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder, if the CPU eater ads will die if more people install adblock. For years I have used my custom blacklist on adblock, which will get new entries every time a page will show a autoplay video/audio ad or banner loading will block the main content from showing.

Re:Finally!

[tlhIngan]

Umm... you could just not let Flash play. That's easier than using an automated method designed to avoid bad behavior in a Turing Complete language autorun natively.

That assumes you don't want said flash running anyways.

There is just as much chance it happens while running flash just like it does on HTML5.

So I'm running Flash because I want to watch a video (or play a flash game, or download a file) and one of these annoying won't-go-away ads show up (which because it's flash, has a nice tendency to bypass plugins that block ads and crap).

With flash, it's all or nothing - if a flash thing wants to show an ad and force you to see it, there's nothing you can do about it other than close the webpage. If it was done in HTML5, then just that bit can be blocked while still getting full functionality.

Re:Finally!

[datavirtue]

Is this supposed to be a newsworthy innovation? Sounds like a basic requirement to me.

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

Bear in mind that that would likely mean it will appear in nightly builds in August, but it probably won't make it to stable builds until at least version 41 (given that it likely relies on an internal project called Electrolysis that still needs some time to bake).

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh, carpet-bombing CPU and memory is not tab dependant - that's a feature in Firefox core.

Re:Finally!

[GuldKalle]

Next step is muting all domains not on a whitelist.

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've looked up what type of chain and cassette I needed for my bike and went to the local bike shop to buy the parts. This happened a week ago and I'm still seeing adverts for bike chains and cassettes when I disable adblocking software... Why does Google think I still need to be spammed with adverts of something I've already bought a week ago? When will advertisers who pay for these unnecessary ads finally realize that their adverts don't work because Google is showing them to the wrong people (like me who already bought what he needed) and not because they aren't making irritating sounds...

Re:Finally!

[bondsbw]

I'd love to combine that with the mute toggle. Everything starts silent, and you can unmute any domains you want to hear. That builds your whitelist.

Re:Finally!

[supremebob]

Yeah, and only about 18 months behind Chrome on this feature.

I wonder if the new Microsoft Edge browser has this feature. If so, Mozilla can gloat about beating them to it by a week!

Re:Finally!

[KGIII]

Opera, even now with it's current WebKit incarnation, has had an 'icon' that showed which tabs had playing media. It has had this feature for quite a while now. It does not allow you to mute it, AFAIK, but it does let you see which tab is blurting out sound and allow you to navigate to it quickly. Opera always gets the cool features first, they just suck at monopolizing on this.

It would be nice to see CPU/RAM usage. I seem to recall that Chromium does this. I typically just use a single browser across all platforms. I have found the sync functionality to be especially handy because of this.

Of course, I say that but I am actually making this post in Lynx. No, I do not have a good reason for doing so. (Does anyone have a good reason for using Lynx?) I am doing it just because I feel inferior for having never tried to post to /. with Lynx before. So, no, I have no good reason...

Re:Finally!

[Mal-2]

No shit. I've been requesting this exact feature for at least five years.

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, 940 suspended tabs and 60 active ones. You close 50 of them and nothing changes. Opening a new tab takes countable seconds. Don't get me wrong, I understand the FF devs don't care about my use case, I just don't understand what it's doing that makes it take so long. Is it re-saving every tab to restore in case the browser crashes? Though the slow down doesn't feel linear.

(I'm slowly changing my workflow to use more bookmarks)

Re:Finally!

[arglebargle_xiv]

Now if we could only get CPU/RAM usage as well!

On a related note, show the CPU use of scripting, and allow temporary enabling of scripting on a per tab basis (but block third party and hidden https calls in the scripting like the gew-gal code)

An even better one would be to simply allow disabling of animations and sound and whatnot on non-visible tabs. This is one of the major CPU-sucks in Firefox (at least in my experience), the fact that it insists on animating a dozen GIFs and who-knows what else in non-visible, background tabs, with the CPU on my laptop pegged at 80% and the fan screaming away trying to keep the system from melting.

Firefox developers, an inactive tab is, you know, inactive, not "sucking up 80% of the CPU in the system doing nothing useful". As the OP pointed out, this is, finally, an almost-useful feature added in a new release of Firefox. Not actually that useful, but almost. Just keep plugging away there, eventually a new release will finally contain something worthwhile.

(I mean it has to, eventually, doesn't it? You can't just keep throwing random features at a browser without eventually hitting a useful one, can you? Can you?).

Re:Finally!

[Zontar The Mindless]

Breaking themes and extensions with every new release isn't a useful feature? Who could tell?

Re:Finally!

[serviscope_minor]

Brilliant!

I'm really looking forward to this. Firefox (well, in fairness, stupid websites with "app" envy) are responsible for a lot of CPU usage and shortening of battery life. I lookforward to being able to kill hoggy tabs easily.

Re:Finally!

[davester666]

Also, whatever Amazon does to try to try and super-track what I am doing on my computer. I can always tell if an Amazon page is loaded, a CPU is pegged at 100% and every other tab will feel like my computer has just been dipped in cold molasses.

Re:Finally!

[Cederic]

If you have 1000 tabs open then you definitely need to learn how to use a computer.

Re:Finally!

[Blaskowicz]

People use the browser as a music player now.

Re:Finally!

[MisterToad]

Now I have another reason to go back to Firefox

Re: Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

It probably isn't as simple as you make it out to be. What counts as inactive? Let's say it is a flash animation or some other plugin. That is handled by the plugin and while Firefox could just freeze that instance when that tab is hidden that would potentially break whatever that flash component was doing.

For instance it could stop playing audio that you wanted to play, stop calculating or loading something they you were waiting for it to load while you do work in another tab, or disconnect from a server it was streaming data from.

Animated GIFs should be easy enough to pause, but I seriously doubt those are causing your performance issues.

It is more likely JavaScript doing something, in which case you have the same problem as above. How does Firefox know it is safe to freeze execution of the JavaScript on the page?

A manual pause button on the tab might be a better idea and may be possible to accomplish with a plugin.

Re: Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

Consider that most browsers, especially with HTML5 allow web devs to make their own controls video playback.

With that it is pretty trivial to call your play button from a script that runs on page load. Or on mouse over or on scroll.

People can easily abuse the features to get around attempts to stop autoplay. It is not like they are all using an autoplay tag that can just be removed.

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

Memory usage for me is relatively stable, but once per day i have to restart firefox because it slowed to a crawl. Loading more than 1 tab in parallel yields a 30% chance of firefox freezing for about a minute.

Chrome on the other hand runs more stable, eats more ram, and sometimes locks up on startup.

I really hope the Firefox team fixes this before i also switch to Chrome at home.

Re:Finally!

[yithar7153]

That's why you install Flashblock and click on the stuff you want to play.

Re:Finally!

[Seferino]

It can work both with and without Electrolysis. However, you are right that it will take time, so don't expect it before 42 (current Nightly) or 43.

Not that Useful

[avandesande]

Any browser tab that starts inadvertently making noise is immediately closed.

Re:Not that Useful

[cen1]

It's usually a problem when you open several tabs at once and one of them starts playing. And you have no idea which one.

Re:Not that Useful

[Runaway1956]

Ehhh - I'm in agreement with your approach - but I don't usually bother. The headphones generally lie at arm's reach. Occasionally, I'll hear the things making odd noises. If the noises from the tabs aren't very loud, they never get my attention. WIth uBlock and NoScript, most pages don't load noise making advertisements anyway.

But, most certainly - if a noisy tab annoys me, it's closed immediately. Although, I have to SEARCH OUT the offending tab. With this addon, I suppose the search is over.

(Imagine one browser on the main monitor with 20, 30, maybe more tabs open. Imagine a VM open on the second monitor, with another browser which often has even more tabs open. Search for the offending tab? TBH, though, that second browser is on I2P where few people try to autoload stupid bullshit.)

Re:Not that Useful

[amicusNYCL]

Seriously. BS that Chrome doesn't easily let you mute the tab, there's a little X right there. Click on that and, poof, no more audio.

Re:Not that Useful

[hackertourist]

If the tab you're looking at is the source of the noise, that's easy enough. But I often have 50+ tabs open in several windows, and then good luck hunting down the culprit. This feature will be a God-send.

Re:Not that Useful

[Billly Gates]

They do.

IT has been out for awhile. Advertisers found a way to disable it without javascript

Re:Not that Useful

[amicusNYCL]

You misunderstood my post, but whatever.

Advertisers found a way to disable it without javascript

Why hasn't that bug been fixed?

Re:Not that Useful

[Earthquake Retrofit]

It's usually a problem when you open several tabs at once and one of them starts playing. And you have no idea which one.

So this is more bloat in FF isn't it? It doesn't even solve what's a niche problem for those few people who insist on having so many tabs open they cannot read them. If you can't read them, you can't see which one to mute.

Re:Not that Useful

[Anonymous Coward]

I use tabmixplus, so I get multiple rows of tabs. I can always see my tab labels. Hopefully the two will integrate together.

Re:Not that Useful

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

So this is more bloat in FF isn't it? It doesn't even solve what's a niche problem for those few people who insist on having so many tabs open they cannot read them. If you can't read them, you can't see which one to mute.

I typically have 3 or 4 browsers open with 5 ~ 10 tabs in each one...and being able to tell which tab has overstepped its bounds would be an extremely useful feature for me.

Re:Not that Useful

[KiloByte]

The real problem is, why a webpage can make noise without permission.

Seriously, all video/audio should be behind a click-to-play block by default, with no way around.

Re:Not that Useful

[Anonymous Coward]

oh slashdot geeks think they are representative of the majority of the internet users. news flash guys and gals, you represent such a small fraction of the internet population you're not even a blip on any major browser developer's radar.

You may not have tabs open that make noise, but your dad, mother, wife, daughter, son, cousin, grandmother/father, uncle, aunt, and 99% of your neighbors do, many times a day, every day.

Re:Not that Useful

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that useful to you, I could say the same that Firefox is not that useful since if I accidently open it, it is immediately closed.

Re:Not that Useful

[Anonymous Coward]

My dad, mother, girlfriend and 99% of my neighbors do use smart phones to surf the internet and don't have the problem with tabs that make noise in the background.

Re: Not that Useful

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you browse news sites (including /.) without tabs?

I know that I'm not the only person who browses the stories on the front page and opens the interesting ones in tabs. Once the interesting articles are all open I then close the main window and read the tabs one at a time. It's just so much easier than bouncing back and forward between articles and the main page, particularly for those sites that aggressively tailor the content of their main page to serve up articles like the ones you've read previously (leading to the "damn, I saw an interesting article here 5 minutes ago and now it's vanished" problem).

Re:Not that Useful

[Lost Race]

I can't imagine why this is such a bewildering puzzle for the Firefox guys. Click to play video: how hard could it possibly be?

Re:Not that Useful

[del_diablo]

But what if your webpage wants special background noise for a occasion?
I know 4chan occasionally has done this, on various boards, to celebrate events or just to troll people. /a/ have had M. D. Geist theme running for a few days, a honking variant of Neon Genesis Evangelion, and many more. /v/ had some of the Earthbound themes running after Iwata died, for at the least 3 days.

I agree background noise serves no purpose for most websites, since they are basically read only static pages. But there are exceptions, and by making it "click to play", most users will never spot it.

Re:Not that Useful

[Anonymous Coward]

But what if your webpage wants special background noise for a occasion?
I know 4chan occasionally has done this, on various boards, to celebrate events or just to troll people. /a/ have had M. D. Geist theme running for a few days, a honking variant of Neon Genesis Evangelion, and many more. /v/ had some of the Earthbound themes running after Iwata died, for at the least 3 days.

I agree background noise serves no purpose for most websites, since they are basically read only static pages. But there are exceptions, and by making it "click to play", most users will never spot it.

I'm willing to sacrifice these rare usages for the greater good.

Re:Not that Useful

[Anonymous Coward]

Row row fight the powah. The powah in this case is autoplaying audio and video and I'm going to fight it to the bitter end.

It's About Time!

[tbq]

That's the only really useful feature that I've wanted built in for years that hasn't been available.

Re:It's About Time!

[Anonymous Coward]

Be thankful that Adobe finally deigned to do something worthwhile with NPAPI Flash, then. If it wasn't for Flash being the #1 reason people want to mute tabs, Mozilla would have implemented this years ago. Now let's hope Adobe fixes some more of the numerous bugs and issues with NPAPI Flash.

Re:It's About Time!

[Zanadou]

Now let's hope Adobe fixes some more of the numerous bugs and issues with NPAPI Flash.

Yes, by killing it off.

Thank the gods

[m.dillon]

We finally get video and sound working properly and it's just been driving me BATTY when I have 30 firefox tabs open and can't figure out which one is making all the noise.

My absolute favorite is actually when a video site has video ads on the side bars that play over the video in the article. Sometimes more than one at once.

On the bright side, it finally caused me to get off my duff and map the mute and volume keys into X.

-Matt

Re:Thank the gods

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't a browser mute non-focused tabs by default?

Re:Thank the gods

[paul_metcalfe]

Set flash to 'click to play'. This solves almost all instances of it, and also solves supercookies etc.

Re:Thank the gods

[Runaway1956]

Holy shit - they do that? Videos in the sidebar drown out the main feature video? uBlock or AdBlock, and NoScript. At the least, block third party scripting!

Personally, I don't recall ever having that happen to me.

Re:Thank the gods

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

You have Flash?
The Mute button is going to get a lot of use when this feature makes it.

Re:Thank the gods

[amicusNYCL]

I believe that the technology to do something like that exists, yes. But if people are listening to music through their browser they probably aren't looking at that tab also, it's just in the background.

Re:Thank the gods

[squiggleslash]

HTML5 video cannot be set to "Click to play" at present.

This idea seems to be a horrible hack to get around the fact that Mozilla, Google, et al, refuse to deal with the lack of any popular support for "autoplay" being a thing.

Re:Thank the gods

[gstoddart]

Uninstall Flash and get on with your life.

This solves all instances.

Re:Thank the gods

[Billly Gates]

Try adding flashblocker.

In 2015 we still need flash like we needed IE 6 in 2005 for some websites. Flashblocker is click to play so you can watch all your HTML 5 videos and still use flash for CBT Nuggets or music from youtube.

It is a big boost for security and it is how I have Chrome setup.

Re:Thank the gods

[m.dillon]

Yup, they sure do. Not only is HTML5 video in ads happening a lot more these days, some sites insert the ads in-line with the article making it difficult for adblock software to distinguish them from graphs and other things that are part of the article.

I've got adblock installed in chrome, but not firefox yet. For some reason some sites think I'm on a chromebook when I use chrome, instead of DragonFly, which I find hilarious. Adblock in firefox is next.

No flash for ages. Last thing I would ever do. HTML5 or nothing, baby! I complain to sites like Pandora that still have flash requirements for certain browsers, but not for others.

-Matt

Re:Thank the gods

[Anonymous Coward]

>We finally get video and sound working properly and it's just been driving me BATTY when I have 30 firefox tabs open and can't figure out which one is making all the noise.

That's so true for many people. Ironically no one seems to complain about not knowing which tab turned on the cam/microphone.

Funny thing that an OS X update long ago took out the ability to turn the microphone gain all the way down to zero. But there's other snoopy weirdness too. Its a bit strange that the hosts file works for other browsers, but not Safari. I'd thought MS was the only one using their own DNS in IE but I wasn't paying close enough attention. Of course some could argue that it's done for performance reasons, but then why the stories of things like the UUID get sent?? And what's all the stuff padding URLs of redirects when cookies are disabled?? Block redirects, but show what they are so users can decide if they're something to avoid or perhaps prune.

If another browser vendor that respects privacy comes along there may be more anxious potential than other vendors would want to acknowledge.
Are there any well maintained forks of Firefox that behave well these days?

Re:Thank the gods

[wonkey_monkey]

My absolute favorite is actually when a video site has video ads

Ads? What is "ads"?

Re:Thank the gods

[paul_metcalfe]

That reminds me, you can actually mute the flash process separately too, at least in Windows.

Re:Thank the gods

[paul_metcalfe]

You don't even need a plugin or addon for it, it's part of your browser!

It's called "Ask to activate" in Firefox, not sure about Chrome.

Re:Thank the gods

[paul_metcalfe]

Not html5 video and audio, like Youtube.

Re:Thank the gods

[paul_metcalfe]

Block ads if you find them obnoxious. Force content providers.

Something animating in the corner of my vision is annoying enough, let alone something that produces sound.

Re:Thank the gods

[antdude]

I only play one video at a time.

Another trick

[Anonymous Coward]

in my book has been to use MS Windows Audio Mixer to mute all browser noises. After all, who listens to audio streams or watches video in a browser? Not me, sir.

Re:Another trick

[OrangeTide]

There is this cool new website called YouTube where you can watch videos that various random people publish.

Re:Another trick

[Anonymous Coward]

There was this cool new website called YouTube. YouTube is now a website that shows ads with some random people videos in between the ads.

Thank the gods!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hooray!

oh no you dinnit!

[Anonymous Coward]

a properly configured HOSTS file will prevent those kind of shenanigans.

Re:oh no you dinnit!

[Anonymous Coward]

If it catches on, advertisers will stop using hostnames and start using IP addresses. And they'll be the IP addresses of major CDNs so if you just firewall off the IP address half the internet quits working.

Re:oh no you dinnit!

[Anonymous Coward]

If it catches on, advertisers will stop using hostnames and start using IP addresses. And they'll be the IP addresses of major CDNs so if you just firewall off the IP address half the internet quits working.

The Internet consists of more than the world wide web, you know.

Re:oh no you dinnit!

[ArchieBunker]

They will just splice ads right into the content you are watching, like Hulu.

Meanwhile...

[Sir_Eptishous]

Man Invents The Wheel!

Need to know which tab using all CPU

[Sam36]

I'd rather know which tab is eating up all the cpu cycles. Plenty of times with my laptop on my legs, I'll start to notice a burning, looking at Top will show FF using 100+%. But finding which page is doing it is a total pain.

Re:Need to know which tab using all CPU

[Tablizer]

McAfee.

This isn't a default?

[tnk1]

I don't recall ever enabling this feature and I've seen in in Chrome for awhile now. Perhaps I've forgotten doing it, but I rarely change the Chrome flags, and usually only for a very specific reason based on debugging or something.

I don't care anymore

[OrangeTide]

I block all ads using hosts and element hiding. I don't get annoying audio crap in my browser anymore. I'm currently not creating revenue for Slashdot, Wired, etc. but I kind of stopped caring anymore now that I've got what I wanted.

Re:I don't care anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

Me too, I was against blocking advertising for a long time, but the annoyingness combined with spyware installers running through ads it is now time to block them all.

Re:I don't care anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know that you are still paying for the ads that you don't see?

I don't know why people get the idea that ads make content for free. Adverts are just a corporate tax that is present on all products and which is a lot higher than the value added tax of the government.

Ads cost a lot of money, and that money has to be generated by selling products. When you block ads, you are still paying for them. Ads are unethical because they are a hidden tax unlike value added tax (and many people even think VAT is evil).

I no longer watch traditional ad sponsored television, I get what I want through streaming services (which is pay on demand), yet I still have to pay the full price for the products I consume (I don't even know what irritating channels the companies whose products I buy support, but over 50% of the total price goes is just to pay for marketing).

Re:I don't care anymore

[OrangeTide]

Ads cut into corporate profits, they are an investment, when they pay off with more sales, they are a good investment. When everyone blocks the ads, then they are simply a drain on profits and ought to be eliminated or fixed. Companies are not likely to blindly pay for ads if they are projected to lose them money.

If you think not watching ads will make everything cheaper, that seems unlikely. But if you think not watching ads will get businesses to think of different ways to promote products and stop interrupting your day with their bullshit, that seems more feasible.

Chrome is annoying

[ArcadeMan]

You have to turn on the #enable-tab-audio-muting flag in chrome://flags/.

This is not the type of things I expect from a company the size of Google. The same decision was made to hide plug-ins configurability from users by hiding it inside an "unknown" special URL.

The same can be said for their "developer tools", I can't even find a way to enable/disable things like CSS via either a keyboard shortcut or a menu item. I have to enable the dev tools that takes half the browser to then hunt down the CSS enable/disable switch.

What kind of idiots are in charge over there? Must be engineers or third-rate programmers.

Re:Chrome is annoying

[Sir_Eptishous]

You're missing the point about Chrome and Google in general.

Chrome and it settings are setup to hide things from the general purpose user. It is all done deliberately, and none of how Chrome is set is due to being idiotic or third rate.
If anything is diabolically genius, how their browser is setup to be a gaping hole to suck all private info from users to continue Googles quest for absolute power and control.

Example?
What happens when you run Chrome in "incognito" mode?
You get the cute "spy" image in the upper left corner and the usual "OMG you're running incognito! God help us!"

A better way

[Anonymous Coward]

What I would want is all video, sound, script playing in all tabs to be always suspended, except the tab I am currently looking at.

Is there any browser that does that?

Re:A better way

[roc97007]

What I want is all video, sound, script playing in all tabs to be always suspended, except when I explicitly permit them to operate. Just confining them to a tab is not sufficient, because you can be watching a video in a tab and have the sound cluttered up by one to three commercials auto-running on the same page. (And I'm not talking about pr0n sites -- certain news sites have been especially annoying lately.)

Re:A better way

[ihtoit]

what I want is each tab to be a sandbox as tight as a Virtualbox VM that I can just pause just like I can with a Virtualbox VM session, preferably to happen when I take focus off it.

Re:A better way

[Anonymous Coward]

Completely agree - media should be treated like mail lists - opt-in only! I'll play it when and if I am ready for it, and browsers should ignore it until then.

Re:A better way

[Anonymous Coward]

What I want is all video, sound, script playing in all tabs to be always suspended, except when I explicitly permit them to operate. Just confining them to a tab is not sufficient, because you can be watching a video in a tab and have the sound cluttered up by one to three commercials auto-running on the same page. (And I'm not talking about pr0n sites -- certain news sites have been especially annoying lately.)

Yeah, CNN used to be especially annoying about this. I've noticed that they have gotten somewhat better, with better being a rather relative term meaning that now I usually don't have to kill the browser or reboot my laptop to load their webpage. But they still have quite a bit of room there for improvement.

While they're at it, let me boost the volume.

[bistromath007]

I am sick and tired of videos at "max volume" capping out at around 20% of my system volume. I can't hear shit. Why does this keep happening, and why am I unable to find a more powerful volume control than the standard system one?

Re:While they're at it, let me boost the volume.

[nmb3000]

I am sick and tired of videos at "max volume" capping out at around 20% of my system volume. I can't hear shit. Why does this keep happening, and why am I unable to find a more powerful volume control than the standard system one?

For Windows, if the media is coming from Flash, you might check and see if the Flash application volume got turned down. This happens to me on an irregular basis -- I will adjust it up and then at some point it gets turned way back down to around 5%.

If the Flash and Firefox application volumes are up, the system volume is up, and your physical speaker knob is up, then it could be the media was simply recorded very poorly or maybe your soundcard drivers have yet another volume you can adjust.

Wait, what?

[roc97007]

People still browse the internet with the sound on? That's so... nineties.

Re:Wait, what?

[jedidiah]

A PC without sound is what's so... nineties.

For those of us that actually experienced those times, and actually remember them, that was back when PCs didn't even come with ANY audio capacity by default. You usually needed a 3rd party enhancement. One company in particular was prominent in this area. You've probably never heard of them.

Bundling CD drives with 3rd party sound cards was also a thing.

Fix the memory leak

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox still crashes after running for a few days in a pretty predictable cycle. It starts using up a lot of memory, then the tabs get glichy looking, then it crashes. Older versions didn't do that; it would be nice if the newer ones didn't either.

Really? it took this long?

[solune]

Opera has had this; in fact, I find for a lot of things I prefer that browser. I believe the staff is more tolerant at Opera too.

Re:Really? it took this long?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, that's nice. I used to like Opera a lot too when it was its own browser. But Opera is a Chromium browser now, which means it got that feature for free when Google implemented it for Chrome. It's easy to be nice when you've already alienated a huge chunk of your userbase.

Plus, other browsers that used NPAPI (like the old Opera) didn't have the ability to know when Flash was using audio or not, let alone control it, without iffy hacking that was buggy and crash-prone at best. Thankfully Adobe *finally* graced the NPAPI version of Flash with an update all this time later that lets Firefox implement this feature (at least on Windows and perhaps OSX).

At the same time

[Anonymous Coward]

Can they fix the mysterious video plugins where the volume control does nothing?

OMG

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Okay, now THIS is a useful feature that almost every user will appreciate.

Re:OMG

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't know that this was a problem honestly...

The only tabs that've ever made noise for me are the ones where I click on the noscript icon to allow flash to play a video I wanna watch.

Re:Safari will be first

[Alan Shutko]

Safari 9.0 in the OS X 10.11 beta does this. So it'll be a race!

More useful

[Anonymous Coward]

A more useful feature would be to open a tab with audio/video muted and not allow it to play until the user selects to let it play. There are even plugins for Firefox that do this.

nice one

[ihtoit]

you learn something new every day! Didn't know about the #flags thing.

Extensions to the rescue...

[rduke15]

Yes, it should be a standard possibility in the browser. But until then, I use Firefox-Muter.

But it's stupid to need an extension for something as basic. Or even for a (completely unrelated) 15 year old bug which still needs an extension to be corrected.

Re:Chrome DOES have "mute tab" button

[SeaFox]

Chrome DOES have "mute tab" button right on the tab - I use it everyday ... Look at http://www.omgchrome.com/how-t... or just look up "enable chrome tab mute" to learn...er...what you should have researched before you wrote TFS.

You know, the summary is only four sentences long. Is your attention span too short to read the whole thing -- where in the next sentence it's mentioned it has to be enabled using the same trick you linked to?

how are you fucking clowns still affected by this?

[Anonymous Coward]

it's probably been at least 5 years since my browser made a single noise I didn't authorize.

It's about time

[PPH]

Whenever the boss comes by, I can switch to a work related tab. But if my browser keeps making porn sounds, he gets kind of suspicious.

Mute by default

[PenguinJeff]

I want a mute by default option and an easy way to unmute and play list on the side. Example: lets say the page I'm on has 3 advertisers and all three decide to play their sound clips on load. WTF this does nobody any good. I can't understand any one of them. What I'm asking for is a place to click maybe a sound icon that when clicked shows the items on the page that want to play sound. I can click on the object and allow it to play.

The feature I really want...

[Mike Van Pelt]

... when some web page blasts me with noisy ads at 2AM, is the power from the movie "Scanners" to reach through the Internet with my mind and make their server melt down into a puddle.

useful..

[Anonymous Coward]

..The option is available in Google's browser, but it's not enabled by default (you have to turn on the #enable-tab-audio-muting flag in chrome://flags/).

Ah, thanks for that, it never occurred to me that they'd implement that, intrusive advertising and all that...

That's nice

[overshoot]

Now when can we find out which tab is sucking 80% of the CPU cycles?

Re:That's nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Press Shift F5 to open the CPU profiler. Before you toggle it on then off after a minute for results, click the sprocket options icon and tick "Show Gecko Platform Data". More info at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance/Reporting_a_Performance_Problem

Re:how are you fucking clowns still affected by th

[Anonymous Coward]

it's probably been at least 5 years since my browser made a single noise I didn't authorize.

That's just peachy. Now would you deign to gallop down from Mount Olympus, get off your high horse, and share with the hoi polloi how you do this? Your insight might be useful to the rest of us. Thanks ever so much.

It's even worse than you think

[CrashNBrn]

uMatrix log, slashdot.org

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Need this feature for Firefox *window* icons

[ayesnymous]

I don't just have one Firefox window open with tons of tabs. I have multiple Firefox windows open, each with tons of tabs. If I start hearing noises, I might look at all the tabs and not see the sound icon. So I have to then switch Firefox windows and keep looking. I need a sound indicator on the Firefox window icon in the taskbar.

Or how about ...

[Misagon]

Or ... how about having all tabs muted except the one that is active?

Re:Or how about ...

[Useless]

That'd suck for me at least. Frequently listening to youtube videos in the background while reading other tabs (like right now for instance).

#enable-tab-audio-muting ..

[nickweller]

"The option is available in Google's browser, but it's not enabled by default

#enable-tab-audio-muting is enabled by default on this Chrome version 44.0.2403.89 beta ..

You mean like Safari 9 in El Capitan does?

[jpellino]

Like that?

Non feature

[elvstone]

Nothing should play unless I press play. Geez.

Now if only...

[rakslice]

the could actually FIND the tab that is making the noise instead of making me HUNT for it visually.

I rather see legislation

[MoarSauce123]

that punishes autostarting videos on web pages with a minimum 10 year jail sentence.