I tend to keep quite a few tabs and windows open while browsing, which often leads me to the annoying situation where music, sound, or voices suddenly and mysteriously begin playing from my computer and I am unsure of the source. This can be especially annoying when i'm trying to do something else with sound, such as watching videos or playing games, only to find myself interrupted by loud exhortations to buy some product or other or simply interrupted by random music. Sometimes these come from the annoying tendency of website ads to have sound and video, and occasionally I've simply left a video loading in another tab and forgotten about it. With even a mere ten tabs, it becomes a massive chore to track down just where any given unexpected sound is coming from.
I propose, then, a browser plugin that would track which tabs or windows were playing which sound files, and display a list of sounds being played, with an option to disable or enable sound being played from that tab. By checking through the sounds, it would be easy to determine which tabs were playing what sounds, and closing that tab or shutting off whatever was playing the sound.-- Hive_Mind, Apr 08 2012 browser_20silencer [spidermother, Apr 09 2012] Sound tag on Tabs http://www.engadget...dentify-noisy-tabs/A brief article I just came across. [neutrinos_shadow, Nov 11 2013] Just a small audio level meter in the tab would probably suffice. Click the meter to mute the audio.-- Cedar Park, Apr 09 2012 I was thinking it would work like 'show downloads' does. As I've said before, you can avoid this sort of (annoying) problem by having sounds etc. turned off, and explicitly consenting to any that you want to download. Also, haven't we done this already?
I might have been thinking of (link), which is a bit different, but addresses the same problem.-- spidermother, Apr 09 2012 Flashblock and Adblock ? Don't get me wrong, if a site has adverts that's fine by me, but my old system can't display a page with many Flash items in realtime (and too many Flashes in too many tabs and the browser locks up for minutes at a time, thrashing both disk and processor), and mouseover popups are way beyond fair advertising.-- FlyingToaster, Apr 09 2012 I just disable the lot - flash, popups, cookies, javascript, sounds, animated images, automatic downloading of images. It might sound extreme, but it's bliss. For the few websites that really need those things, just turn them on for that tab or window. (I too have a pretty ancient system and limited internet quota, but would now do the same on any system, just for the peace of it).-- spidermother, Apr 09 2012 It can of course be seen that i'm not using Lynx at the moment, but i seriously recommend it when you need none of the other stuff. You need a reason not to use it. Regarding advertising, i don't care about ones which are not intrusive but i think i've never responded to one and i suspect it's a myth that it works. I know it's said that half of advertising is wasted but i think it might be all of it. The other thing is that if something is advertised, it makes me doubt its quality and want to avoid it. I'm on the other side of this as well because i advertise myself. I think the same applies to what i do.-- nineteenthly, Apr 09 2012 In the "Life follows Art" files, it seems Google Chrome is doing this (or something like it) now (I'm on Firefox); <linky>.-- neutrinos_shadow, Nov 11 2013 Is there any reason why the browser couldn't play sound only from the foremost window, and mute any windows in the background?-- MaxwellBuchanan, Nov 11 2013 [MaxwellBuchanan]; you might want to be listening to music from another tab while surfing, but the default should definitely be "mute", with switchability.-- neutrinos_shadow, Nov 12 2013 random, halfbakery