

Browser tabs should indicate which pages are playing audio - andrewstuart

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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rcfox
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!

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andrewstuart
>>>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?

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rcfox
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.

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Off
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.

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

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proexploit
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.

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av500
no, pages should not play audio unless users asks for it...

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FreshCode
And Video! I would pay for this.

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diamondhead
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.

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albertzeyer
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.

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joebadmo
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.

