
Everyone can now track down noisy tabs - cleverjake
http://chrome.blogspot.com/2014/01/everyone-can-now-track-down-noisy-tabs.html
======
junto
As a parent I was more interested in the "supervised users" feature to monitor
your children's internet usage. Parents desperately need something simple to
help them make sure that their children are safe on the internet.

Most solutions are far too technical for most parents to understand and their
children are more technically aware than they are, even at a young age.

It is of course important that parents can educate their children about the
dangers of the internet, but such a feature is like having stabilisers on a
bike. Once your children show you that they can be trusted the you can take
the supervision off and give them the privacy they they too deserve.

I think Google is hitting a sweet spot if they can get that feature right.

[http://chrome.blogspot.de/2013/10/a-beta-preview-
supervised-...](http://chrome.blogspot.de/2013/10/a-beta-preview-supervised-
users.html)

~~~
jack-r-abbit
Same here. I didn't realize tabs playing music was such a rampant problem that
needed to be addressed. The supervised users feature has a lot of appeal to me
as well. My kids' computer (Mac Mini) has Chrome set as the default browser.
I'll need to look into this more closely.

~~~
sentenza
Initially, I also wondered how many people have the noise problem. So far, the
only way I managed to maneuver myself into that situation in Firefox is by
having a few hundred tabs open (enough to make FF become sluggish and
unresponsive) and then clicking around too much in an unresponsive interval.
In that situation, I'd end up with some tabs, unknown to me, that I had
accidentally clicked, which then start playing youtube videos.

There might, however, be more exposure to this problem for people who don't
use adblockplus and noscript. I'm just not sure how. You'd open a bunch of
tabs and then a few seconds later one of them would start blabbing?

~~~
jack-r-abbit
I guess I just don't use my browser the same way. I don't typically have more
than 15-20 tabs open but I very rarely have a tab open that I'm unaware of. I
must also manage to avoid all the annoying sites that use ads that play
automatically. I don't use adblock or noscript and I think I can count on one
hand the number of times I've had an ad play on its own. And it was always
pretty easy to spot and rectify.

I wonder how many tabs you can open before the tabs become too narrow and this
new speaker icon goes away. Or maybe it would take the place of the favicon on
a really narrow tab.

~~~
jaredsohn
>I wonder how many tabs you can open before the tabs become too narrow and
this new speaker icon goes away. Or maybe it would take the place of the
favicon on a really narrow tab.

I just experimented with the beta and found that as the tabs narrow, it over
time does change prioritization between the favicon, title, and audio
indicator. On my 15" Mac Book Pro, once I hit about 40 tabs in one window I
can no longer see the audio indicators.

I think Chrome will need to show the user an overview of audio indicators
(similar to what I attempted to do in my MuteTab Chrome extension.) You can
get some information at chrome://media-internals but 1) that isn't user facing
and 2) it doesn't let you perform commands. I would have to guess the reason
this hasn't happened is because Chrome works really hard to provide users with
a minimal interface; perhaps they could provide an audio API and let people
who care about this install an extension?

------
daremo_
"On the desktop, we’ve updated the default styling of UI elements like form
controls and scrollbars"

They kept that one quiet didn't they. A strange "feature" addition that's
starting to cause quite an uproar on the Chromium issue tracker:
[https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=279464](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=279464)

~~~
joshschreuder
It's really horrible, here's the same radio group in Firefox and new Chrome:

Firefox: [http://i.imgur.com/T8dWHcl.png](http://i.imgur.com/T8dWHcl.png)

Chrome: [http://i.imgur.com/EMNjV4P.png](http://i.imgur.com/EMNjV4P.png)

The Chrome one somehow removes padding and also looks like a disabled control
when in fact it isn't.

~~~
Grue3
Chrome's renderer has always been extraordinarily ugly coming from Firefox.
HTML Forms and font rendering specifically.

------
nairteashop
Does someone know how this feature works?

I thought this was difficult/impossible to do because plugins like flash
communicate directly with the OS APIs, bypassing Chrome (this was confirmed by
the Chrome team in a reddit AMA a while back).

I suppose this is possible with the Flash plugin that comes bundled with
Chrome, but what about other plugins, like Java?

Edit: never mind, found this on omgchrome: "the indicator will be successfully
triggered by most browser audio...this means the flash version that comes
built-in with Chrome, HTML5 content and apps making use of PPAPI/NACL plugins.
But a few things aren't picked up, including anything making use of "out of
Chrome" plugins, like Silverlight and Quicktime."

------
noname123
Good feature, but to take it one step further. I'd like to request an auto-
mute feature filtered by domain names. Why?

Too often, when you are surfing on streaming movie sites and porn sites, you
are forced to disable AdBlock in order for the videos to load properly; but
you'd get those annoying popup tabs in the backgrounds with JasmineCam for
porn sites and P&G/J&J household product ads for movie streaming sites. I'd
like to mute those tabs right away and also right click and add them to the
"mute audio list". Someone with the pull, please add this to the Chromium
project tracker!

~~~
jcampbell1
This feature should be implemented as an extension. The only reasonable thing
to request in the project tracker is to have the audio status available in the
extension api.

------
unicornporn
So, if I'm researching and I have ~40 tabs open, what will be visible? I
already have trouble seing the tab titles.

Modern desktop displays are wider than they ought to be. Vertical space is
scarce while there's almost always space left on the sides. I still can't
grasp that they scratched the vertical tabs feature, because it made total
sense. The reason I'm on Firefox: [https://addons.mozilla.org/sv-
se/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/sv-
se/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)

------
dredmorbius
Close but no cigar.

Unless I specify otherwise, media should play in a window _only_ when it's
active, _unless_ I specify otherwise.

Media should _not_ play automatically by default. Again, unless I've activated
it.

A bigger issue is that browsers are absolute crap for managing content
generally. My typical session is: start with a few launching points (project
pages, wiki/blog, newsreader, possibly social page), queue up material to look
at.

At this point, my preference would be that the material I've queued up _doesn
't even fucking load_. Too many pages and too much memory simply pigs stuff
out.

Most browsers currently have a "pin as app" option for tabs -- if you want
your GitHub, CampFire, Jira, Gmail, or similar pages to _run as apps_ , then
set them to _run as apps_.

Unfortunately, the browser has, for some time, been stuck in a worst-of-all-
possible-worlds limbo: it's _neither_ a good reading environment -- for that
you'd want something like Readability, Pocket, Instapaper, or an eBook
management tool such as Moon+Reader, Kindle, or (bad as it is) Calibre --
_nor_ a decent applications environment: it's bloated, crash-prone, slow, full
of security holes, and underfeatured relative to native applications.

However in both cases the browser's ability to load and display or run
arbitrary content makes it convenient.

What do I want? Vastly better content management tools. Bookmarks and tab
management on steroids. As Jay-Z said: I've got 99 tabs open and your autoplay
isn't the one I'm looking at. If something's in background, _let it fucking
die already_ , saving state somewhere and restoring it should I happen to
navigate back to it. Keeping a _small_ number of tabs (2? 6? 12?) active
should be more than enough. Least used gets offed when I switch to number n+1.

And figure out what the hell you want to do with the applications space. I do
use some Web apps, but still largely find them annoying. I've all but given up
on G+ and Gmail for numerous reasons, but the fact that my Chromium session
becomes completely unusable once I've got either open really doesn't help
matters much.

Frankly, this is like providing cleaner, brighter living quarters for slaves
when what needs to be done is emancipation. I appreciate the thought, but it's
far too little, far too late.

~~~
makmanalp
I can't help but wonder if it's too late for that at this point. Users expect
a page to be "loading" while they're not looking at it. Loading and running
both swf and javascript often takes part as the initialization of the page.
It's frustrating to a user when they open multiple tabs and expect them to be
loaded by the time they switch to one, but the page is just now starting to
load.

Maybe this is a symptom of the fact that loading orders, preloading, etc isn't
built into the standard, but is hacked on top?

~~~
dredmorbius
So, how about this happens: I add a link to my reading queue. This _downloads
the content_ but then saves it to cache. The page isn't rendered. It doesn't
even open as a tab, but as some sort of reading queue, linked by context to
where I opened it from, date, and other related metadata, plus more I can add
(tags, etc.), later.

If I want it rendered in a clean "Instapaper" view, I get that too.

If it's ephemera, it clears automatically. If I want to have it stick around,
that too.

When I actually _do_ load it up, it's reading locally from disk. This is
pretty much how Readability itself works, in the app versions, and it's quick
even on low-powered devices such as my rather old HTC Incredible Android phone
(faster than most Web pages these days, and rather more compatible as I'm now
multiple revs out of date).

As for SWF and Javascript: I tend to keep both disabled by default, and for
most content, neither SWF nor Javascript are generally meaningful. There's the
odd site which fails utterly to render without them (it's more than a tad bit
ironic that Google's own blogging platform is one of the worse offenders), but
that's pretty much the minority.

~~~
derefr
This is precisely how Safari's Reading List feature works. (Not that anyone
would ever use it to know.)

~~~
dredmorbius
Pity that's not an open standards multi-platform browser or I might try it.

But good to know.

------
ereckers
Now if you can just mute it directly from the tab they'd really be onto
something.

~~~
deletes
I would prefer preventing audio + video to start on a tab that is not
selected.

~~~
JoshTriplett
That would also prevent using a web browser to run a music player in the
background.

~~~
deletes
Note the phrase _preventing to start_. Already playing media would be
unaffected.

+: Also the rule would be extended to include minimized browser even if the
tab is selected.

~~~
jayd16
What does that even mean? You can't stop at a single file or stream as that
would most likely still break things. If you allow tabs that play sound to
continue to play sound you could just run a small, short, silent sound file on
page load and then do whatever you want for the life of the tab.

~~~
gibybo
I think you could mitigate the 'play short/silent sound on page load'. Each
tab would have a max volume limit. The limit can be increased automatically
while the tab is open, but it must stay within some % of that limit when the
tab is not open. The default limit would be 0. You can add some restraints on
the length of sound too, like require a sound to play for at least a second
before adopting its new volume for the tab.

------
swamp40
Why don't they just give you the option to only play the video/audio when the
tab is active?

Facebook already auto-starts some videos only when they are in view, so the
technology is available.

If you want streaming audio, you just have to open up a new window.

~~~
acqq
Exactly: let the user decide "I need this thing to keep playing music/video in
the background." But unless he enables it, play it only when it's topmost.

------
valarauca1
Does a similar feature exist in firefox? Or even as an addon?

Several searches couldn't yield a result.

~~~
padenot
So, I've got a little hacky patch that _kind of_ does that, but only for
<video> and <audio>, because we don't have access to flash's source code, so
we can't hook into it. This (only <audio> \+ <video> \+ Web Audio these days)
is not really hard to do, I can guide a volunteer if someone feels like
writing the patch (or part of it, even).

I've been thinking about dll interception stuff to make it work with flash,
but I'm not sure if it can be done reliably.

~~~
est
> I've been thinking about dll interception stuff

In Win7 you get audio volume per process option when you click the speaker
tray icon. So the OS does know the process source of audio

Since Chrome is multi-process I think it's easy to identify the noisy process.

Just an idea.

~~~
jaredsohn
He's talking about Firefox here. :)

But anyway, major browsers (other than IE) -- even when tab per process --
only use a single Flash process for all tabs, so you cannot distinguish at the
operating system level. Chrome is now able to show audio indicators because
Flash is embedded via a new kind of plug-in (Pepper) which allows them to
track it.

~~~
cpeterso
Since Firefox knows which tabs embed Flash content and whether the Flash
plugin process is playing audio, Firefox might be able to guess which tab is
playing Flash audio. For example, if there is only one tab with Flash content.
:)

~~~
jaredsohn
But due to ads, if many tabs are open then many will have Flash on them. Run
Chrome, install my MuteTab extension
([http://www.mutetab.com/](http://www.mutetab.com/)), open a few tabs, and
look at the extension popup to get an idea of how pervasive Flash is.
(However, if you also run Adblock then it becomes a little more reasonable,
since you've greatly reduced the number of tabs playing with Flash on them.)

Yeah, you could look at which tabs were recently opened when sound started
playing. But then once sound is playing, you won't be able to detect if
another tab that plays sound was opened. And the sound might have come from a
tab that had been open for awhile.

------
jackocnr
Finally! I have wanted this feature since I started using tabs, about 10 years
ago. Yet another win for Chrome.

------
laureny
This only goes half way, sadly: noisy tabs will only be shown with the symbol
in your Window list if they are the active window in that tab. If you have
another tab open, it's that tab that will appear there, so you will still have
to hunt down all your windows and then look for a tab with the symbol.

Disappointing.

Similarly, I can't believe it's still not possible to name an entire window,
e.g. "Hacker News", which would contain all my open HN tabs.

------
nfoz
Alternatively, we could have designed the web so that autoplay of audio/video
isn't a thing.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Autoplay provides better UX for some sites, though.

------
jeorgun
Wait, did they just release the Aura/ChromeOS desktop as a Metro app?

~~~
zastrowm
It kind of seems that way. I was wondering the same thing so I tried out -
sure enough, launching it in metro mode and it looks like what I expect
ChromeOS would be (I don't actually have a device running ChromeOS), with an
apps bar, a clock, and "start/apps" button.

------
operanotgoogle
what's with the submission's titles ? This one is obviously marketing aka
false. I'm using opera on linux to browse the web, how a new feature in chrome
affects me ?

~~~
jaredsohn
The submission title comes from the source webpage. (Look at the source URL
for context.) It says "everyone" because the previous announcement was that
people using the beta version had this feature.

------
drdaeman
So, assuming I'm using Chrome, how do I download malicious file now?
(Assuming, I know it's malware but still want to download it, say, for further
dissection.)

~~~
mnw21cam
wget. curl. Seriously, if you're dealing with malicious files, you don't want
some massive software package interacting with it. Attack surface area, and
all that.

------
Magi604
I noticed this not too long ago. It's a very welcome addition since there are
so many audio/video ads that autoplay these days.

------
piyush_soni
This is Brilliant! My reasons to continue using Firefox are reducing by day
:(.

------
deepak365
This works well in Ubuntu too.

------
ChristianMarks
Excellent. Could have used this feature when AOL acquired the Huffington Post.

