Chrome Extension Helps Find Noisy Tabs

mutetab writes "I recently wrote a Chrome extension called MuteTab that helps you narrow down which tab is making a sound by detecting which tabs contain plugins, HTML5 audio/video, and Java applets. It also gives you a right click menu that will mute tabs (via Javascript APIs when available, otherwise hiding them like FlashBlock does) and can automatically mute background tabs. Be sure to read the FAQ writeup to learn about some ways we can improve detecting which tab has sound and mute it." This really seems like stuff that should be a built in browser preference: like maybe an option to only allow audio out of the visible tab.

Re:That sounds useful

[JavaBear]

Of all the "new" things they add to the browsers, this is the one thing that would make all but the most annoying advertisers happy.

Another pair of must have features would be "Pause all scripts on background tabs" with sub options for types such as JavaScript, Flash, Audio and Video, and "throttle priority for background tabs" to limit the impact of for instance Javascript while you open a number of pages. These tabs have plenty of time to load while you read the others.

Re:Is this the place?

[iamhassi]

Agreed. While he's not charging for this extension and it is useful there are I'm sure hundreds of very useful Chrome extensions out there and /. is not the place to post all of them.

I'd also like to comment that I disagree with CmdrTaco (sorry!!) to add an option to only allow sound from the visible tab since I listened to internet radio and leave those running in a background tab.

Instead I would like there to be maybe a small speaker icon on the tab itself, perhaps on the right side next to the X, that would appear if there was sound coming from that tab. That I would find useful.