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Google Chrome may soon get audio indicators to show you noisy tabs

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Re: Google Chrome may soon get audio indicators to show you noisy tabs

#11

Post by wslh »

DeepDuh wrote: post #7
simonsarris wrote: post #4

This is more exciting than half of the features in HTML5.

Only if it works reliably though. I wonder whether they can make it work with plugins. Maybe you'd have to get a hook with some platform specific OS API that tells you when sound is playing (does this even exist though)? You could then match this to user interactions within the browser - did the user click inside my browser window when the event started? Then it's probably happening within that tab and I'm gonna show…

Yes, on Windows you can intercept/hook the Audio API and know where the calls came from.

My company has done that for multiple applications: http://www.nektra.com/products/audio-recorder-api/

Remember that on Google Chrome there is a separation of processes so you can differentiate what tab iis related to the sound.

Re: Google Chrome may soon get audio indicators to show you noisy tabs

#12

Post by ayuvar »

wslh wrote: post #11
DeepDuh wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if it works reliably though. I wonder whether they can make it work with plugins. Maybe you'd have to get a hook with some platform specific OS API that tells you when sound is playing (does this even exist though)? You could then match this to user interactions within the browser - did the user click inside my browser window when the event started? Then it's probably happening within that tab and I'm gonna show…

Yes, on Windows you can intercept/hook the Audio API and know where the calls came from. My company has done that for multiple applications: http://www.nektra.com/products/audio-recorder-api/ Remember that on Google Chrome there is a separation of processes so you can differentiate what tab iis related to the sound.

It seems like it would be a nice feature on multiple monitors to use stereo/3D sound to locate an alert sound coming out of a window.

For instance, if it's on the extreme side of the right monitor, play a sound in the right speaker.

Re: Google Chrome may soon get audio indicators to show you noisy tabs

#15

Post by jaredsohn »

I wrote the MuteTab Chrome extension (http://www.mutetab.com/) and have been following the development of this feature in Chrome's bug tracker.

The reason this feature hasn't existed is that Chrome (like all browsers other than IE) would use just a single instance of Flash for all tabs so the browser could not control the volumes independently nor tell which Flash instances were playing sound or might ever play sound. You can read this explanation from Chrome devs here: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/gdyun/iama_we_are_thre...

My understanding (just from reading comments in the bug tracker) is that Google was able to get Adobe to cooperate with them and add some hooks so they could keep track of the sounds for each Flash plug-in separately.

I was able to try this feature out in today's Canary build and it worked for me on the two sites I tried it on: youtubedoubler.com and homestarrunner.com.

The URL chrome://media-internals is also interesting in that it will show an entry for each plug-in instance browser-wide. Hopefully they will have a UI element similar to this or like MuteTab so that a person can find the tab making sound when they have a huge number of tabs open in multiple windows and cannot see all of the audio indicators.

Re: Google Chrome may soon get audio indicators to show you noisy tabs

#16

Post by derefr »

president wrote: post #10
ypeterholmes wrote: post #8

Even better would be a play/pause button... or is that not feasible? I'm not so familiar with browser development.

Perhaps a mute/unmute would be more feasible.

Or a per-tab volume control. Volume control for HTML5 videos, games, etc. has always seemed to me like something that belongs in the browser chrome, not inside the tab itself.

(Really, this is another way to say, "I'm a lazy HTML5 developer and I think having to create a 'sound-effects preferences' view on every project I do is a bit silly, if the browser could just be handling it for me." ;)

Re: Google Chrome may soon get audio indicators to show you noisy tabs

#17

Post by gojomo »

dbcooper wrote: post #14

Firefox bug for this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=486262

I would also love a simple indicator of which tabs are 'busy' consuming cycles or generating garbage, so I know which tabs to kill first to get back to acceptable performance. (Perhaps even just a rough indicator of how many setTimeout()s are originating from a page would be enough.)

Re: Google Chrome may soon get audio indicators to show you noisy tabs

#18

Post by jaredsohn »

dbcooper wrote: post #14

Firefox bug for this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=486262

I'm curious if it will be possible to get this feature working in Firefox. Since other posts here indicate that this was possible for Flash because it is using the Pepper stack and since Firefox has said they do not plan to adopt Pepper (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=729481), I wonder how possible this will be.

This feature could significantly negatively affect Firefox's market share.

Re: Google Chrome may soon get audio indicators to show you noisy tabs

#19

Post by jrockway »

DeepDuh wrote: post #7
simonsarris wrote: post #4

This is more exciting than half of the features in HTML5.

Only if it works reliably though. I wonder whether they can make it work with plugins. Maybe you'd have to get a hook with some platform specific OS API that tells you when sound is playing (does this even exist though)? You could then match this to user interactions within the browser - did the user click inside my browser window when the event started? Then it's probably happening within that tab and I'm gonna show…

There's only one plugin that people actually use, Flash, and that runs in a NaCl sandbox anyway. So there is no need for any hacks to get this to work.
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