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Chrome Will Soon Let You Permanently Mute Websites (androidpolice.com)
Google Chrome will soon allow users to permanently mute websites, a feature that will cheer millions who suffer through autoplaying videos on (annoying) websites every day. From a report: According to Google's Francois Beaufort, the Chrome team is still experimenting with this feature. In the early version, the sound toggle is in the page info popup, which you can access by clicking on the far left of the address bar. That's either an info icon or a "Secure" label for sites that have HTTPS enabled. There are already various toggles in there now for things like Flash, JavaScript, notifications, and so on. Soon, a sound toggle will be added that works in the same way. Sites on which you disable sound will remain that way until you turn them back on.
There are a few websites I use that only work in Chrome (because fuck testing in anything else, right modern web developers?), and I'm fuckign sick of having to mute them every time.
I'd love to have the default be "no sound", and only enable it for sites I want sound out of (netflix, youtube, etc).
Now can we set everything to mute by default?
Because, science.
This is amazing if it's true. I hate visiting a news site to read a particular article, and some live news feed, or the video version of the article starts playing. I think that within a month I'll have blacklisted 99% of the offending sites and won't have to browse with my computer's audio muted anymore. What a time to be alive!
moox. for a new generation.
Mozilla is busy killing addons. Moving on.
My thoughts, exactly. Assuming the flag is accessible from Chrome extensions, it should be possible to trivially write an extension that would set the mute flag as soon as you go to a new page and provides a whitelisting feature to disable that behavior for a given page.
If the flag isn't exposed to extensions, file a bug. :-)
That said, just being able to mute CNN.com would be a big win. I'd like to kill their autoplay videos entirely for bandwidth reasons, but at least I'll be able to look at their website now while listening to other things in the background without their stupid autoplay video crap forcing itself upon my ears.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Muting's not good enough. As someone with a slow(-ish) internet connection with a meter on it, why am I being forced to download and play a video I clearly don't want?
With maximum volume as default.
This topic of auto play video nightmares comes up all the time. Very annoying stuff I agree. But apparently everyone has just been suffering with it by the comments I always see.
I installed Flash Control https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... forever ago and never see them. Despite its name, it blocks HTML5 videos as well. Everything is click to play, as it should be. I whitelist youtube and moved on with my life. Are others not aware of these kinds of extensions?
This chrome addition is nice and everything...but auto-muted videos are presumably still loading, using cpu time and bandwidth.
In the early version, the sound toggle is in the page info popup, which you can access by clicking on the far left of the address bar.
Can someone list Chrome's other [hidden] treasures?
That said, just being able to mute CNN.com would be a big win. I'd like to kill their autoplay videos entirely for bandwidth reasons, but at least I'll be able to look at their website now while listening to other things in the background without their stupid autoplay video crap forcing itself upon my ears.
But you will be missing out on CNN - The Most Trusted Name In News...
There are some web sites I just don't want to see, not in search results, not in links, not in stories. I'd like a way of permanently banning them from my browser. How about supporting that in a way that's easier than the hodgepodge of extensions I need to make that happen right now?
THANK YOU! The current crop of ads is taking us in a direction which is in danger of making the web unusable. I realize that ads are necessary to pay for content, and I'm not opposed to that, but autoplay and scripting in these ads is evil. The memory and processing power web browsers consume, largely in powering these ads, is truly insane. If I see an autoplay ad for a product I buy, I stop buying it. If a web site insists on showing me ads that consume a boat load of my system memory, I stop visiting that site. This war of escalation for our attention has gotten out of hand. The only way to put the brakes on this is to make the most egregious offenders realize that their participation in this war is unprofitable.
It's called "Delete Bookmark".
What I want is a way to DISABLE AUTOPLAY in the first place. Not have the video start playing, but with the sound muted. I don't want the video sucking up my bandwidth in the first place.
Why can I not get a "just don't autoplay videos" toggle? Or, better, a "only autoplay videos from these specific sites" whitelist? Why should I need an extension to get what seems like obvious functionality that should be in the core app? Any why, when the core app developers decide to address the issue, do they address the wrong thing?
I'd rather be able to opt out of autoplay videos all together. They really get annoying, especially when I'm close to my data cap.
leaves the sound on be default? Not just in browser, but at the OS level. Too many programs make annoying, and utterly useless, sounds.
No, do it the other way. Let me disable sound on all sites unless I opt to enable it for a specific site. That way I'm not playing whack-a-mole with a million random websites I might one day click. Instead I only get sound on the few dozen websites I frequent which need sound, and the occasional random site I visit where I want sound I can temporarily turn it on.
I hate the evil empire. Google does a lot of evil in the name of not doing evil.
Ask the dead people, right?
Something like this is going to make things like CNN, and ABC things where I can read the news at work again. I have just taken to never going to those sites, because they can't honor my request not to blare loud crap over my background music while I am studying.
I don't care which site it is who wakes up the whole house when I browse the web when I can't sleep at night.
Finally,
No more accidental audio from xhamster and pornhub!!!
as in opt-out of every piece of data collection they do on chrome users?
Do they actually say that? Wow, I visit cnn.com often and I never knew that. I mean, I know I try to keep my PC muted unless I'm specifically watching something specific on YouTube/NetFlix/etc., but I didn't realize I was that (successfully) anal about it.
As much as I like being able to stop those stupid ads attached to game wikis that play audio without prompting, this doesn't solve the underlying problem - the entire cycle is an arms race between browsers and unscrupulous advertisers. I can think of a few examples through the years:
Advertisers pop up a separate window or tab for their ad - browsers add a "this site is trying to launch a popup" confirmation that won't open the popup unless you opt in.
Advertisers open popups that open popups that open popups ad infinitum - browsers add a confirmation dialog that asks if you want the page that was opened by another page to really open another page.
Advertisers track cookies to serve up ads that users do not want following them around - browsers add incognito mode.
Now advertisers autoplay ads with audio - browsers add the ability to mute websites so the audio won't intrude on browsing.
I wish there were a better solution than just reacting to annoying advertisers.
I switched back to FF because Chrome likes to auto-play video and gives no native way to disable it. This is a step in the right direction but they need to add the ability to disable video as well.
Muting audio is a mere work-around to the larger problem of auto-play videos that browser developers have been ignoring for years. Seriously, how are these developers so fucking oblivious? It took them years to fix the pop-up problem, now it's taking them years to address the auto-play video problem.
ALL videos should be manual start unless the user specifically white-lists the page or site. Stopping the auto-play problem would not only cut the need for audio muting, but also greatly reduce unnecessary data transfer.
You can actually do all of this now with mute tab https://chrome.google.com/webs...
Set the default to muted and go into
chrome://flags/ and enable Tab audio muting UI control.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Thanks for the pointer, but why the heck would an extension that just sets a flag on each tab require permission to read and modify content on all websites I visit? This extension is asking for way more broad permissions than it should reasonably need. No, I will not trust an extension to have complete access to the password fields for my bank account just to mute annoying, badly designed websites.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Other way around. With this, I won't be missing out. As it is, I don't bother to go to the website very often because the experience is too disruptive.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The ended up on my permanent blacklist because of that shit. If I can't make it not autoplay, then it gets banned. That simple. I can't fathom how that decision gets made, given how awkward and stupidly annoying it is. Do the people around the board table deciding that they should have autoplay videos actually like that shit?
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
I never hear sounds from web pages. Then again:
1) I don't use Chrome
2) I don't have my speakers turned on unless I explicitly want to listen to something
3) Don't have Flash installed
4) Run uMatrix to stop ads from running
This isn't rocket science. It's disconcerting that people on here even have this issue.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
>"Google Chrome will soon allow users to permanently mute websites, a feature that will cheer millions who suffer through autoplaying videos on (annoying) websites every day"
Sorry, but audio is not the only problem. Let us know when AUTOPLAY OF THE VIDEOS (and even stupid animations) can also be "permanently" disabled. Having a video play is almost as annoying as the audio that goes with it. Many of us can't read or tolerate looking at sites that constantly move and spin and fade... it is beyond severely distracting. And now sites take their F'ing autoplaying videos and MOVE THEM DOWN THE SCREEN TO FOLLOW YOU, just to maximize the annoyance, waste screen space, and cover things you want to see.
At least Firefox + FlashStopper is a HUGE help (despite the name, it has nothing to do with Flash), although it does nothing for non-video animation.
IDK I figure it has something to do with it's blacklisting and whitelisting functions.
Https everywhere also requires it and it only works with URLs and it was made by the EFF.
Otherwise "Clever mute" is the only similar one requiring less. I'm aware of.
https://chrome.google.com/webs...
It requires access to browsing history and permission to display notifications.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
If you REALLY cared, you'd let us order carpet-firebombing of those assholes homes and offices.
Sincerely: We really were that sick of it.
The people who sell ads love it, because the autoplay videos can start with an annoying ad that they get paid for whether the user is actually watching it or not. These days, it's all about monetization at all costs, no matter how many users leave as a result. This is towards the end of the death spiral for the industry.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
My system has external speakers. One of them has a volume control. Therefore I have total control (as well as tonal control ;)
Chrome is nonfree software (aka user-subjugating, proprietary software). Users are not free to run, share, modify, or inspect the complete corresponding source code and build instructions. Only Google, Chrome's copyright holder and proprietor, can do this.
Therefore the alleged "permanency" of any feature in Chrome is up to the proprietor, just as all other features are with any nonfree program. If Google decides to later take this feature away (possibly reframing the decision in a press release with some euphemism as a cover to distract users away from the user's lack of control over the program and thus their computers), so be it. What is pitched as permanent suddenly becomes revealed to be impermanent and up to the whim of the proprietor.
This and all the other problems (when viewed from a user's perspective) with nonfree software apply. You can't trust it will do what you want it to do and even if you find it useful, reliable, and robust against errors (as some nonfree software is) you can't take steps to maintain that or vet it in any serious way. Software freedom (a user's freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify all published computer software for any purpose at any time) is a value unto itself. It's wise not to get lost in the shuffle of new features; even less technically featureful free software is a better choice than robust and featureful nonfree software because features can be added but freedom is usually not added.
Digital Citizen
My computer must be unique. I never have a problem with autoplay because I have a built in volume control that goes all the way to zero. It works in every browser and every program that makes noise. The control for this is just a short reach from my Delete key. In an emergency I can always press Cmd-W to immediately close the web page.
Is it possible that other computers offer such options?
...omphaloskepsis often...
haha that was so wrong. I meant noscript and uBlock Origin. I'm not even using ABP any more, in fact, although they do have an Android browser I guess I will start using... which is based on firefox
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Stop visiting websites that abuse you by blasting you with ads and auto-playing audio/video.
Please for my father's wallet sake, for my third world country's sake, just give me an option "text browsing mode". Dont even load any media. If i want , i will right-click on the media-object on the page and choose load.
It's easy to mute websites. I've been doing so for a a long time.le For example:
facebook-hosts.txt
Or, you know, make the whole problem go away by disabling autoplay for all audio/video content, just like it was in the early days of the web. Oh, wait, Google owns YouTube... that'll never happen.
I assigned one of the buttons on my mouse to mute/unmute. Simce the last thing I probably did was click a link, my hand is already there and it's mutted in a fraction of a second. Works great for Youtube ads where by the time you muted using "normal" controls, you'd have already watched enough of the ad to skip it. Most of your modern mouses come with software to reassign a button to "mute" or one of many other functions.