Hacker News Reader

Comment by SquareWheel | Hacker News Reader

As somebody that opens a dozen HN tabs at once, I do not appreciate the automatic playing music.

The worst part of the whole experience is when you realize that there still is no visual indication in a Firefox tab when the page it contains is running a video or Flash script, or otherwise is making noise in a way that the browser engine can detect.

Do any other mainstream browsers make it easier to find the tab that's responsible for making racket without madly clicking through all of them and/or closing every open browser window?

The issue is that the plugin model means that Firefox has no way of knowing if sound is playing via a plugin. The plugins access the OS's sound layer directly.

Edit: The relevant bug report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=486262

Except that it's not playing via a plugin. It's HTML5 audio. I feel as though this, at least, could be known and indicated.

The objection [from the bug report] being that they don't want to introduce inconsistent behaviour depending on how the sound is being played (plugin vs HTML5 audio).

If I don't like how a plugin works, I can uninstall the plugin. If I don't like how the browser works, I can... oh, I guess I can uninstall that too.

In modern browsers it's possible for a webpage to change its favicon dynamically. Developers should take the habit of indicating their site is playing sound there.

Good luck with that. "Hey annoying people, it's best practice to let us know when you're being annoying".

True... It would still be a useful good practice for non-annoying websites. Sometimes you start a video somewhere but can't remember in which tab it is.

If you were using Chrome, my extension MuteTab (http://www.mutetab.com/) could help. It shows which tabs are playing HTML5 audio/video or have other plug-ins such as Flash. Unfortunately, it just provides a list and cannot tell you for certain if a tab is playing sound or not. (It could in theory indicate if HTML5 video/audio, some Flash sites such as YouTube, and QuickTime were playing sound, but I haven't implemented that portion at this time.)

To be fair.. its sponsored by IE! :(

Yes, but you could have expected it when opening a music artist's page.

The parameter in the URL is a little bit strange though.

Not really strange, the entire point of the page is tracking how this link spreads and therefore being able to track who gave the link to whoever clicks it is clearly useful information.

As somebody who uses Safari, the fact that it doesn't "activate" Flash until you focus the tab is one of its best features.

I actually find that annoying - I like to open videos in the background to let them queue up (and/or let the adroll finish).

I've seen Firefox on windows too this too - do you know how to disable it?

The flash plugin itself is not actually loaded until the tab gets focus.

I use click-to-play in Chrome, but this doesn't use Flash.

Ditto. It conflicted annoyingly with what I already had playing. I managed to take in about four seconds of her vocal before realizing that it was unspeakably bland.

What sort of vocals do you like? Any examples? Just curious with regard to your qualitative opinion here. I happen to like this, but I won't judge. To each their own.

Would you any more go to a 3rd-world country without appropriate immunizations than you browse the public Internet without appropriate flash-blocking plugins?

and just like your immunizations won't save you from a gunshot, flash-blocking is useless here against html5.

FlashBlock extension is pretty good for this (if of course the music/video is flash based)

That I can cope with, what's really annoying is that it stops playing if I minimize the window.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com