Firefox Will Soon Show You Which Tabs Are Making Noise, and Let You Mute Them 151
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/).
Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
Something approximating a useful feature!
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. Now if we could only get CPU/RAM usage as well!
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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.
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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
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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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! (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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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 p
Re:Finally! (Score:4, Informative)
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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 n
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Breaking themes and extensions with every new release isn't a useful feature? Who could tell?
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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.
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People use the browser as a music player now.
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Informative)
And kudos to subby for pointing out the way to do it in Chrome... didn't realize it was there.
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Next step is muting all domains not on a whitelist.
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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! (Score:5, 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
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
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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! (Score:4, Funny)
If Slashdot wants more money replace them with ethical ads and VIOLA.
I prefer violin.
Re:Finally! (Score:4, Funny)
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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
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There are ads on /.? Wait, let me disable Alblock Plus...
It's even worse than you think (Score:3)
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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They will just splice ads right into the content you are watching, like Hulu.
Re: Finally! (Score:1)
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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!
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No shit. I've been requesting this exact feature for at least five years.
Not that Useful (Score:2)
Any browser tab that starts inadvertently making noise is immediately closed.
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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.
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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.
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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.
(Imagin
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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.
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They do.
IT has been out for awhile. Advertisers found a way to disable it without javascript
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You misunderstood my post, but whatever.
Advertisers found a way to disable it without javascript
Why hasn't that bug been fixed?
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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 (Score:5, 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.
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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?
It's About Time! (Score:1)
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Now let's hope Adobe fixes some more of the numerous bugs and issues with NPAPI Flash.
Yes, by killing it off [slashdot.org].
Thank the gods (Score:4)
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
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Can't a browser mute non-focused tabs by default?
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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.
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Set flash to 'click to play'. This solves almost all instances of it, and also solves supercookies etc.
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You have Flash?
The Mute button is going to get a lot of use when this feature makes it.
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That reminds me, you can actually mute the flash process separately too, at least in Windows.
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Uninstall Flash and get on with your life.
This solves all instances.
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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.
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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.
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Not html5 video and audio, like Youtube.
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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.
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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. HTM
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My absolute favorite is actually when a video site has video ads
Ads? What is "ads"?
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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.
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I only play one video at a time.
Another trick (Score:1)
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.
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There is this cool new website called YouTube where you can watch videos that various random people publish.
Meanwhile... (Score:3)
This isn't a default? (Score:2)
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 (Score:1)
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.
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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 interr
Chrome is annoying (Score:3)
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.
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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" im
A better way (Score:1)
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 (Score:4, 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.)
Re:A better way (Score:5, 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.
While they're at it, let me boost the volume. (Score:2)
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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 [imgur.com] 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? (Score:2)
People still browse the internet with the sound on? That's so... nineties.
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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.
Really? it took this long? (Score:1)
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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* g
OMG (Score:1)
Extensions to the rescue... (Score:2)
Yes, it should be a standard possibility in the browser. But until then, I use Firefox-Muter [github.io].
But it's stupid to need an extension for something as basic. Or even for a (completely unrelated) 15 year old bug [mozilla.org] which still needs an extension [mozilla.org] to be corrected.
More useful (Score:1)
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 (Score:2)
you learn something new every day! Didn't know about the #flags thing.
It's about time (Score:5, 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.
Mute by default (Score:1)
The feature I really want... (Score:3)
That's nice (Score:4, Interesting)
Need this feature for Firefox *window* icons (Score:1)
Or how about ... (Score:2)
Or ... how about having all tabs muted except the one that is active?
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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 .. (Score:4, Informative)
#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? (Score:2)
Now if only... (Score:2)
the could actually FIND the tab that is making the noise instead of making me HUNT for it visually.
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McAfee.
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Safari 9.0 in the OS X 10.11 beta does this. So it'll be a race!
Re:Chrome DOES have "mute tab" button (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... [omgchrome.com] 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?