Browser tabs should indicate which pages are playing audio | Hacker News Reader

Browser tabs should indicate which pages are playing audio

29 pointsandrewstuart17 comments

It's frustating to click through tens of browser tabs trying to find which one is making noise. It would be good if a little speaker icon or something appeared on browser tabs that are playing audio.

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Tabs' information densities are already too high. You can't fit most pages' entire title in the tab, so dedicating space for another icon to something that bothers 0.0001% of users isn't very pragmatic.

Besides, how is the browser going to know? There are many ways that a page could be making noise: <audio>, <video>, Flash, Java, other random plugins

Also, how often do you have multiple tabs playing sound? I guess if you middle-click a lot of Myspace links all at once...

If you're running Chrome, why not disable all plugins by default and then set it up so that you can click to enable as needed? That's what I do!

>>>why not disable all plugins by default and then set it up so that you can click to enable as needed?

Care to elaborate? How do I do that?

Preferences -> Under the Hood -> Content Settings (Privacy Section) -> Click to Play (Plug-ins section)

Note: I'm running Chrome 12, so things might be different for older versions. Also, I think I had to enable the click to play in about:flags. Before that, I'd have to right-click and choose enable from a menu.

For Firefox, try NoScript for this functionality.

They could easily "flash" when the sound begins if it's not the active tab. That would be useful, and that wouldn't dedicate any unnecessary space. Especially useful if you have sound turned off. (Similar feature in Ubuntu: when sound is turned off and an application wants to play something the sound icon turns red)

Or the favicon could be swapped for a little speaker symbol?

Either way, as long as it's temporary, as far as I'm concerned.

<audio> and <video> tags don't count as plugins in Chrome, so aren't disabled with this method.

There's this guy who works at Firefox Europe, he made a little hack, you should check it. http://paulrouget.com/e/mediaevents/

He needs feedback to decide if it'll be implemented in The next version of Firefox.

Perhaps just an option to only allow audio from the active tab

This was my first thought as well but would need some option to allow things like playing Grooveshark/Pandora type audio in background tabs by choice.

no, pages should not play audio unless users asks for it...

And Video! I would pay for this.

There shouldn't be browser tabs actually. Tabbing isn't a well designed solution, it's being widely used just because mainstream desktop environments still lack basic window management requirements.

Curious: What would be a better alternative to tabs? I don't want to have dozens of windows open. And when they are group-able, I don't really see the difference to tabs.

I'm also curious, since I agree that tabs as they are currently generally implemented definitely have some issues.

I like what FF4 is doing with tab candy (panorama now?) and tab search. I'd really like a way to be able to see two tabs at once, though, similar to Windows 7's half-maximize.

What non-mainstream solution did you have in mind?

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