

Idea HN: Uninterrupted audio playback (even when I leave a website) - nam3d

All too often I'm scrolling though a website (most often a blog) click to play a piece of audio or video (music, podcast, etc) and carry on scrolling. Without thinking I press 'next page' or close the website all together whilst the media is playing in the background. I then have to either go back a page or re-open the tab.<p>I'd like an extension for my browser that realises that I've left the page but keeps on playing the audio (or video) uninterrupted in the background.
======
michaelhart
There are a lot of technical limitations for something like this.

Flash is controlled by the browser, and most media embeds are flash; an
extension would need to prevent the browser from killing the flash element on
page away, which I am not entirely certain if it's technically possible in
Chrome or Firefox without extensive modifications to the browser itself. If
you're referring to embedded media using HTML5 tags, then I'm pretty sure you
could write a simple Firefox Jetpack script to return null inside the page,
and play it in the status bar instead. But that wouldn't work everywhere (as
few websites use the audio tag).

Another alternative, which I doubt will gain adoption, is using a custom
protocol like media:[url], which when you hit play, instead of playing it as a
page element, it tells the browser to play it (like Windows Media Player or
VLC). The only problem would be, of course, getting the browsers and web
developers to adopt this scheme.

