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

thenextweb.com

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

#81

Post by primitur »

jrabone wrote: post #72
primitur wrote: post #66

Great, yet another feature that should be being implemented by the OS VENDOR, intead being implemented in a non-standardized manner by an APP DEVELOPER. See kids, this is what happens when your OS vendors decide that its more important to add shiny to their products than it is to fix deep architectural problems. In this case, that problem is that the AUDIO API's do not already have a native way to add this indicator,…

Actually, Windows 7 audio DOES do this - I see separate volume controls for applications if I click on the volume control tray icon. Likely requires driver support for the feature.

Yeah so this is what I mean exactly: use the OS features instead of hacking the App up to do what, should be in my opinion, something just provided to the App by the OS..

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

#82

Post by akx »

ayuvar wrote: post #12
wslh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interestingly enough, the Rollercoaster Tycoon games (1 and 2 at least) did this for UI sounds. (I also recall reading this had been a feature of some OS of yonder.)

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

#83

Post by pcwalton »

jaredsohn wrote: post #18
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.

Shumway is a more direct route to solving this problem than reverse engineering the Pepper API. The Shumway approach has several other advantages too, such as portability and unifying the graphics/audio/JIT stacks of the browser and Flash. Assuming Shumway works out (that's a big assumption, but so is assuming that Pepper could be reverse engineered and shipped), I don't see any technical obstacles to Firefox doing this as well.

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

#84

Post by podperson »

Good idea but:

How about visual indicators of CPU-burning tabs, especially when in the background?

How about a ctrl-C that kills all JavaScript executing in the foreground page (or something)? In my experience Chrome is good for three infinite loops or similar bugs before it needs to be restarted (manually process killed in Windows) while Firefox is pretty much dead after one. Isn't Chrome the "one thread per tab" browser? Why is it so hard to kill JavaScript when debugging?

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

#87

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

>>This change would presumably also be very useful for instantly recognizing which tab is annoyingly blaring sound when you have countless tabs open.

Fantastic, I've wanted this feature for years; and counting browser tabs is easy. FYI, This isn't my feed, just some public one I found. https://cosm.com/feeds/63631

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

#89

Post by darkstalker »

mike_esspe wrote: post #50

If you are excited with this feature, you should probably try "click to play" for plugins.

This. Click to play solved this problem since a long time. For me the noise of a website isn't the music, it's the advertising.

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

#90

Post by jrockway »

justinschuh wrote: post #30
jrockway wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Flash runs in the Pepper/PPAPI sandbox, not NaCl. Your confusion is understandable, however, since the first version of Pepper was the browser API layer for NaCl. The difference is that NaCl applies an inner sandbox layer that's much stricter than the sandbox used for Pepper Flash (or normal Chrome web content for that matter).

Ah, interesting. At least reading the public Pepper docs, it seems like there is a hook where the browser requests audio from the plugin/NaCl app/whatever. Is that how Flash gets its audio data into the host's audio subsystem?
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