Google Chrome Getting Audio Indicators To Show You Noisy Tabs

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."

Re:Good idea

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Good idea

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Not just for memory management

[JaredOfEuropa]

(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 ./

Re:Good idea

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Good idea

[Eraesr]

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.

Re:Flash and plugin sounds

[slart42]

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.

Re:Good idea

[jones_supa]

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 [mozilla.org], which allows you to start Flash plugins manually by clicking them.