Everyone can now track down noisy tabs
chrome.blogspot.com
chrome.blogspot.com
Most solutions are far too technical for most parents to understand and their children are more technically aware than they are, even at a young age.
It is of course important that parents can educate their children about the dangers of the internet, but such a feature is like having stabilisers on a bike. Once your children show you that they can be trusted the you can take the supervision off and give them the privacy they they too deserve.
I think Google is hitting a sweet spot if they can get that feature right.
http://chrome.blogspot.de/2013/10/a-beta-preview-supervised-...
There might, however, be more exposure to this problem for people who don't use adblockplus and noscript. I'm just not sure how. You'd open a bunch of tabs and then a few seconds later one of them would start blabbing?
It's not really a sufficient solution for me. I'd prefer to explicitly allow tabs to play sound. I believe Firefox experimented with that approach and found users didn't like it, though.
I wonder how many tabs you can open before the tabs become too narrow and this new speaker icon goes away. Or maybe it would take the place of the favicon on a really narrow tab.
I just experimented with the beta and found that as the tabs narrow, it over time does change prioritization between the favicon, title, and audio indicator. On my 15" Mac Book Pro, once I hit about 40 tabs in one window I can no longer see the audio indicators.
I think Chrome will need to show the user an overview of audio indicators (similar to what I attempted to do in my MuteTab Chrome extension.) You can get some information at chrome://media-internals but 1) that isn't user facing and 2) it doesn't let you perform commands. I would have to guess the reason this hasn't happened is because Chrome works really hard to provide users with a minimal interface; perhaps they could provide an audio API and let people who care about this install an extension?
It is actually a problem I've wanted a fix for since, I don't know, maybe Phoenix .9 or whatever first introduced me to tabbed browsing in the world. this is a huge feature. I suspect the other browsers will try to follow too, if they aren't already in their dev/bleedingedge repos.
But since you asked... there have been many times when I used my wipers thousands of times each day for several days on end. But we're experiencing a bit of a drought right now so I've not used them in a couple months.
Also, some things are kind of frustrating, but not frustrating enough to bother spending ages fixing it.
Quite often something will happen and I'll think "there must be a fix. I just don't know the OS enough yet" - and sometimes there is a really easy fix and sometimes there is an ugly 3rd party kludge. While the problem is kind of annoying having a fix just fixes the problem, while searching for a fix teaches me more. (Am I making any sense? Its about the journey not the destination).
I can't even imagine how that is useful. I guess it is to them or they wouldn't do it.
On firefox is just Bookmarks > Bookmark All Tabs
I tend to "open in new tab" and queue things for reading.
Because I tend to open lots of new tabs within a short period, it makes identifying the one that is playing sounds very hard. The worst is the "delayed video player" scenario, especially if it is below the fold. It's incredibly annoying and embarrassing to be desperately trying to find where the noise is coming from if it happens in a boring meeting.
Some youtube videos are not blocked by flashblock and it is highly annoying when two videos play at the same time.
Some new site use autoplay videos too, and again, I like to open multiple tabs and then close them at the same time. Of course I can figure out which tab is causing it, but it is annoying having to do it. With this feature, I can just kill it.
Unfortunately, I don't know how to stop HTML5 videos from auto-playing.
The most common culprit lately has been YouTube with HTML5 supported videos and autoplay, which I fucking despise. My immediate reaction is to close tabs.
My MO with browsing generally is to queue material up for review later. Crap that demands my attention usually gets it by way of a fist.
Any other domain which commits the same or similar crimes either gets the offending page element removed via Stylebot, or AdBlock's element blocker, or with an /etc/hosts file 0.0.0.0 entry. Life's too fucking short for that shit.
And yesterday, it happened on a news page. The page autoplayed a video, which always bugged me. I looked around the page, found the annoying little video, and stopped it. About twenty minutes later, my laptop suddenly started talking. It took a minute or so to figure out that the page that had autoplayed earlier had a 20 minute refresh cycle, and each refresh restarts the autoplay. Once I identified the tab, I closed it.
So I'd like to see 1) an easier way to identify where the sound is coming from (such as these tab icons) and 2) a "don't autoplay" preference.
The feature is called "supervised users" not "locked in a tower users". So information can flow however the supervisor wishes. It could be simply a "monitor & discuss" role where seeing the user's browser history gives the supervisor information about what the user has been reading and they initiate a conversation about it. It doesn't have to lead to blocking and restriction. It can be another tool for parents to use to teach their children.
Surveillance has a chilling effect and parent-child surveillance is no different.
If I had to do this, I would have just avoided the internet as much as possible. I suspect most kids beyond age 9/10 are roughly the same.
I would never have learned to program, never have started reading HN, never have browsed Wikipedia except for specific queries. I would never have acquired the information or communication and technical skills I currently possess. I'd be a completely different and vastly inferior person looking at a much less interesting future.
> It doesn't have to lead to blocking and restriction
"Monitor and supervise" is orders of magnitude worse than content filtering. This approach forces children to block themselves from having any sort of individual experience. If your child is even slightly introverted and is old enough not to not want to share every second with you, "monitor and supervise internet activity" is equal to "learn about and engage with the world around you as little as possible." It sends a message that by default, information is bad - any time you do seek information, you know you'll have to justify your curiosity. This doesn't just apply to objectionable content, it applies to everything.
I was happy to show my parents my finished projects and even wrote a few specifically for family. If I were getting interrogated, incompetently, about every intermediate step ("Why did you install django-south? What's a database? What's a schema? What's a query? What's a function? Oh, is that like a ___? No, mom, go away.") I would have just watched mindless TV instead.
Could you imagine knowing that you will have to discuss every link you follow and every Google search you enter with anyone, let alone your parents? That's horrifying.
There is a difference between the government-citizen surveillance and parent-child surveillance.
In both cases, a figure of authority (legitimate authority!) spys on you, pro[poradly for your own good. (Maybe even really for your own good! Just because the NSA's spying hasn't actually successfully foiled any terrorist plots yet doesn't mean that all spying programs of that sort are ineffectual...)
The one difference that I can see (and it's not an unimportant one) is that a good parent is open about what they are doing, and talks to the kid, gets the kids opinions. While organizations like the NSA try their hardest to make sure the citizenry don't even know that they're being spied on. This is a way in which a parent's spying might be not quite as bad.
However, remember that at least in theory the USA is a democracy, while a family is best described as a dictatorship. In the ideal world where the US government actually listened to its citizens and engaged in discourse with them, the USG would have by far the moral high ground over parents, even over parents who run a benevolent dictatorship where they actually listen the kid and make family policy accordingly, as a benevolent dictatorship still has certain problems when compared to a true democracy.
Your shallow sanctimony excludes a gigantic middle between "let your kids do whatever they want" and "keep your kids in a padded room lined with Bible verses."
So what?
"Kid does something, figures out it was a bad idea" isn't a tragedy. Definitely doesn't rise to the level of justifying censorship. It's being a kid. It's learning.
Seriously, human beings are going to choose (partially) negative experiences sometimes and you should let them. It's part of being a person. Use of (physical|emotional|technological) force to prevent this is both disturbing and ultimately futile.
Warnings are one thing, but you still have the right to ignore them and find out for yourself why they were given.
O.o
Have you, like, seen children? My roommate's one-year-old regularly chooses to throw himself headfirst off the couch. She uses physical force to prevent him. Disturbing and futile, apparently!
Or, if we assume an exception for physical injury, I would certainly have chosen to spend my childhood indoors playing video games if my parents hadn't used emotional force to get me to go to school. I suppose you can try to derail onto the failings of public education if you like, but I wasn't interested in alternative education either; I just wanted to play video games, which would probably have resulted in me still living at home at 35 instead of having a degree and a satisfying, well-paying job. Clearly they should have just "warned" me that I was going to ruin my entire life, then stood aside and let me learn, eh?
As parents ourselves this gets us into the cycle of being protective around our own children and it is definitely needed to minimize the encounters and be there to safely catch them when they fall
A bird pushes its fledgling off a ledge to make it fly but also hurries to take it under its wings when it senses a predator about. Guess this is basically the dilemma of every parent (every child that becomes the parent)
Which happens in many families I know, so before anyone says that’s impossible because of the „teenage rebellion”: too bad all the kids that can assert their independence while still talking to their parents about pretty much everything exist.
They kept that one quiet didn't they. A strange "feature" addition that's starting to cause quite an uproar on the Chromium issue tracker: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=279464
> In UI review we decided that these scrollbars are OK for an M32 release, and that if there's bad user uproar we can live with it for one milestone then change in M33.
I wonder how pervasive this view is within the Chrome team. It actually explains a lot of issues I have run into that suddenly get fixed in the next release. I thought they were just bugs that had slipped by, but now am wondering how many were by design.
Removing them seems like a great step, but I might be brainwashed by the fact that Mac OS has done away with them already.
They already don't use native tabs (which most OS interfaces provide) and I'd call this a positive. In fact, I'd argue that many of the native UI elements are customized, but most people are used to that, largely because the customizations improve the product, so that's kind of why I asked the original question: what about this change makes the product worse in practice, why not insist all elements be native then if it's just an argument for consistency and not one for a loss of usability/productivity?
The new scrollbars are annoyingly thin and hard to see, though.
Firefox: http://i.imgur.com/T8dWHcl.png
Chrome: http://i.imgur.com/EMNjV4P.png
The Chrome one somehow removes padding and also looks like a disabled control when in fact it isn't.
I thought this was difficult/impossible to do because plugins like flash communicate directly with the OS APIs, bypassing Chrome (this was confirmed by the Chrome team in a reddit AMA a while back).
I suppose this is possible with the Flash plugin that comes bundled with Chrome, but what about other plugins, like Java?
Edit: never mind, found this on omgchrome: "the indicator will be successfully triggered by most browser audio...this means the flash version that comes built-in with Chrome, HTML5 content and apps making use of PPAPI/NACL plugins. But a few things aren't picked up, including anything making use of "out of Chrome" plugins, like Silverlight and Quicktime."
Too often, when you are surfing on streaming movie sites and porn sites, you are forced to disable AdBlock in order for the videos to load properly; but you'd get those annoying popup tabs in the backgrounds with JasmineCam for porn sites and P&G/J&J household product ads for movie streaming sites. I'd like to mute those tabs right away and also right click and add them to the "mute audio list". Someone with the pull, please add this to the Chromium project tracker!
Modern desktop displays are wider than they ought to be. Vertical space is scarce while there's almost always space left on the sides. I still can't grasp that they scratched the vertical tabs feature, because it made total sense. The reason I'm on Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/sv-se/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
Unless I specify otherwise, media should play in a window only when it's active, unless I specify otherwise.
Media should not play automatically by default. Again, unless I've activated it.
A bigger issue is that browsers are absolute crap for managing content generally. My typical session is: start with a few launching points (project pages, wiki/blog, newsreader, possibly social page), queue up material to look at.
At this point, my preference would be that the material I've queued up doesn't even fucking load. Too many pages and too much memory simply pigs stuff out.
Most browsers currently have a "pin as app" option for tabs -- if you want your GitHub, CampFire, Jira, Gmail, or similar pages to run as apps, then set them to run as apps.
Unfortunately, the browser has, for some time, been stuck in a worst-of-all-possible-worlds limbo: it's neither a good reading environment -- for that you'd want something like Readability, Pocket, Instapaper, or an eBook management tool such as Moon+Reader, Kindle, or (bad as it is) Calibre -- nor a decent applications environment: it's bloated, crash-prone, slow, full of security holes, and underfeatured relative to native applications.
However in both cases the browser's ability to load and display or run arbitrary content makes it convenient.
What do I want? Vastly better content management tools. Bookmarks and tab management on steroids. As Jay-Z said: I've got 99 tabs open and your autoplay isn't the one I'm looking at. If something's in background, let it fucking die already, saving state somewhere and restoring it should I happen to navigate back to it. Keeping a small number of tabs (2? 6? 12?) active should be more than enough. Least used gets offed when I switch to number n+1.
And figure out what the hell you want to do with the applications space. I do use some Web apps, but still largely find them annoying. I've all but given up on G+ and Gmail for numerous reasons, but the fact that my Chromium session becomes completely unusable once I've got either open really doesn't help matters much.
Frankly, this is like providing cleaner, brighter living quarters for slaves when what needs to be done is emancipation. I appreciate the thought, but it's far too little, far too late.
Maybe this is a symptom of the fact that loading orders, preloading, etc isn't built into the standard, but is hacked on top?
If I want it rendered in a clean "Instapaper" view, I get that too.
If it's ephemera, it clears automatically. If I want to have it stick around, that too.
When I actually _do_ load it up, it's reading locally from disk. This is pretty much how Readability itself works, in the app versions, and it's quick even on low-powered devices such as my rather old HTC Incredible Android phone (faster than most Web pages these days, and rather more compatible as I'm now multiple revs out of date).
As for SWF and Javascript: I tend to keep both disabled by default, and for most content, neither SWF nor Javascript are generally meaningful. There's the odd site which fails utterly to render without them (it's more than a tad bit ironic that Google's own blogging platform is one of the worse offenders), but that's pretty much the minority.
But good to know.
By the way, Firefox has don't-load-till-opened tabs, it's just not on by default. Go to the preferences, "General", click on the "don't load tabs until selected" checkbox.
Also, in "about:config", the "plugins.click_to_play" option (which I believe is now on by default) allows you to block plugins by default. Go to "about:addons", in the plugins section, to specify which plugins you wish to block by default.
Close enough too, but like I said, a bug report targeted at HTML media (not just plugins) would probably be well-received.
The fact that Debian tends to stay well behind the Firefox / Iceweasel release curve (and manual updates suck) hasn't helped, though it looks as if I've got Iceweasel 24 available now. I'd have to check to see how much of the memory-management goodness has gotten into it.
All that said: yeah, I'll see if I can't find FF bugzilla and write that request.
Which is what I plan to do to any tab that plays sound I didn't ask for.
+: Also the rule would be extended to include minimized browser even if the tab is selected.
Facebook already auto-starts some videos only when they are in view, so the technology is available.
If you want streaming audio, you just have to open up a new window.
Several searches couldn't yield a result.
Also, I'm generally curious about how IE is able to get away with this since I think the Chrome team said creating multiple Flash instances wasn't reliable because Flash wasn't designed for it in some way (in addition to eating a lot of memory.)
I've been thinking about dll interception stuff to make it work with flash, but I'm not sure if it can be done reliably.
In Win7 you get audio volume per process option when you click the speaker tray icon. So the OS does know the process source of audio
Since Chrome is multi-process I think it's easy to identify the noisy process.
Just an idea.
But anyway, major browsers (other than IE) -- even when tab per process -- only use a single Flash process for all tabs, so you cannot distinguish at the operating system level. Chrome is now able to show audio indicators because Flash is embedded via a new kind of plug-in (Pepper) which allows them to track it.
Yeah, you could look at which tabs were recently opened when sound started playing. But then once sound is playing, you won't be able to detect if another tab that plays sound was opened. And the sound might have come from a tab that had been open for awhile.
Disappointing.
Similarly, I can't believe it's still not possible to name an entire window, e.g. "Hacker News", which would contain all my open HN tabs.