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

Posted by Soulskill on from the hush-little-browser-don't-say-a-word dept.

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/).

18 of 151 comments (clear)

  1. Finally! by weilawei · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Something approximating a useful feature!

    1. Re:Finally! by JMJimmy · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

    2. Re:Finally! by bondsbw · · Score: 4, Informative

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

      --
      All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
    3. Re:Finally! by Billly+Gates · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    4. Re:Finally! by alvinrod · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:Finally! by weilawei · · Score: 3, Funny

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

      I prefer violin.

    6. Re:Finally! by Fortran+IV · · Score: 3, Funny

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

      --
      I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
    7. Re:Finally! by Feanturi · · Score: 4, Funny

      We already get lots of that.

    8. Re:Finally! by Seferino · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    9. Re:Finally! by Seferino · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

  2. Thank the gods by m.dillon · · Score: 3

    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

  3. Re:A better way by roc97007 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.)

    --
    Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
  4. Re:Not that Useful by KiloByte · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
  5. Re:A better way by ihtoit · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
  6. Re:Chrome DOES have "mute tab" button by SeaFox · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?

  7. It's about time by PPH · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  8. That's nice by overshoot · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

    --
    Lacking <sarcasm> tags, /. substitutes moderation as "Troll."
  9. #enable-tab-audio-muting .. by nickweller · · Score: 3, Informative

    "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 ..