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Comment by throwasehasdwi | Hacker News Reader

Enable the tab mute button that's existed in chrome for years but is still hidden:

Go to URL chrome://flags in a new tab Search for the ‘Enable tab audio muting UI control’ flag Hit the ‘Enable’ link Relaunch Chrome when prompted (on Chrome OS a full restart is required)

Now you can click the little speaker that appears next to the tab's close button when a tab is playing sound to stop that tab from playing audio.

God knows why this isn't enabled by default, somethingsomething advertising money...

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I believe that the button is disabled because it's too easy to click by mistake. You can mute a tab in the right click menu without turning on any flags.

Didn't know that! Thanks

It's enabled by default in Firefox.

Wow, this is awesome. Thanks for mentioning this. I've been using Firefox for months now (switched from chrome) and never knew about this feature in either browser.

When you regularly have open 100+ tabs in more than one instance of Firefox across multiple VMs, this is an absolutely indispensable feature. Before its time you would basically have to shut everything down and start over instead of finding that obscure tab that suddenly started belting out news headlines

What are you using 100+ tabs for?

People can use a ton of tabs for a ton of reasons. I used to do the same thing at times, when I used Treestyle tab in Firefox. But it's an old type of extension soon to be deprecated, and was giving me bugs on browser updates (maybe due to it being a XUL extension).

The add-on put tabs on the side of the screen, and grouped them up into trees, which you could also collapse. So if you were to browse Wikipedia and click on all sorts of links, you'd have a whole tree with different branches. Then when you take a break, you just collapse the tree and start a new tree. Want to reference something from the Wikipedia tree? Just expand it again!

It worked really well with the session restore functionality of Firefox, which doesn't reload all tabs again when the browser launches. So you had very little performance impact for what felt like the perfect bookmark and tab integration.

So in order to reach 100+ tabs, it's just one hour of casual browsing per day and within a week you'll have 100 tabs open of Wikipedia trees, various clothing stores, a code problem tree or two, and a HN tree with all the little interesting links.

Then you may wonder why you wouldn't just bookmark pages and close tabs? Personally I open bookmarks a few times a year, but this Treestyle extension made me click around so many times per day.

(By the way, if anyone has found a similar add-on please let me know)

Wow I've never heard of that. The most tabs I've ever personally used is around 25 to do some server stress testing (very low-scale). The most I've ever seen is around 35 from one of my coworkers that uses tabs instead of bookmarks for some reason.

I said 100+ per instance ;)

It's closer to 500 or so at a given time. I have a few instances that only run up a dozen or two tabs in their lifetimes.

I do lots of research on a variety of topics, and break it up with ADHD wikipedia binges and the like, then with aggregators like HN it's very easy to open a dozen or two tabs and just start powering through them.

Some of these tabs sit for weeks, and some just rot away till they are irrelevant and I delete them. You could think of this as a temporary bookmarking system, much in the way you may have a filing cabinet but your desk still stays covered with mountains of papers that are relevant to your current work.

I keep a bookmark bar with just favicons and no text. Only my most-used sites for the domain on which the instance runs. When this bar fills up, that's it. I either make room for new items or they aren't important enough. I have a folder for more "long term" bookmarks that I basically never check. This way, I only keep links to stuff I currently need. Firefox doesn't load them on default so it's very quick and non-resource hungry. It has to be or I couldn't be running 3-4 instances of Firefox at once, when you factor in all of the VM overhead.

I don't use Tree Style tabs like sister comment suggests. I have an unorthodox browsing style that doesn't mesh well with the way it sorts tabs. Besides, the API it uses is indeed being phased out. I prefer using the location bar to quickly search my tabs.

In general, bookmarks just have a limited use-case for me because, if it's static and information-dense I would probably rather save an offline copy anyway in the spirit of doomsday prepping.

You can right click the tab and "Mute Tab" without having to enable anything in the flags.

I wish they also had "mute all other tabs."

Me too!

Sounds like a simple enough addon :)

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