YouTube adds Play icon to page titles so you can see which tabs are making noise

http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/08/03/youtube-adds-play-icon-to-video-page-titles-so-you-can-quickly-see-which-tabs-are-making-noise/

by Lightning • 13 years ago

178 67 13 years ago

thenextweb.com

bichiliad• 13 years ago

THANK. GOD.

w1ntermute• 13 years ago

I feel like this should be part of the browser.

wfn2• 13 years ago

deadreturns2: fyi, you are shadowbanned (this means people won't see and won't be able to reply to your comments). Not sure why.

Cthulhu_• 13 years ago

I'm sure there's a reason for it, and that telling people they've been hellbanned negates the whole purpose of said hellbanning.

dubcanada• 13 years ago

It will be... It was a feature implemented in WebKit like a year ago. http://googlesystem.blogspot.ca/2013/02/chrome-shows-which-t...

It's coming soon I imagine.

LAMike• 13 years ago

I saw this on Canary a few months ago its a pretty nifty feature

OMBUG• 13 years ago

I'm curious as to why they took it out, it's a lifesaver when you have 50+ tabs and one of them has a talking ad.

rhizome4• 13 years ago

If YouTube didn't hire the best and the brightest they wouldn't how know to copy Soundcloud.

kumarm• 13 years ago

So YouTube shouldn't do it because soundcloud did it first. If they copied soundcloud idea, I am really glad they did as a User.

iamshs2• 13 years ago

All he is saying is, it took them long to copy it.

ChrisNorstrom• 13 years ago

Couldn't this have already been done by dynamically changing the favicon using javascript? Or did that not work with all browsers.

rhizome4• 13 years ago

No, it works, and other sites have been using this technique for quite a long time. It just never made it into YT product until now.

fredsted• 13 years ago

Safari doesn't display a favicon in the tabs.

harrytuttle6• 13 years ago

To be honest I think a browser should shut the tab up if it isn't focussed and when you switch to it there should be an unmute button.

There are so many pop-unders these days which start talking to you it's unreal.

I'm not a victim of these regularly (thanks to adblock edge) but I know many who are.

kevingadd• 13 years ago

I don't think that will ever happen; lots of people use background tabs to play music in something like Pandora or Play Music.

harrytuttle6• 13 years ago

They can hit unmute :)

I still use WinAmp. Perhaps I'm getting too old for this :)

johansch• 13 years ago

That's a very old feature wish. With <video/> it's possible to implement, but most people are still using the flash player, where, with the current NSAPI it is not very easy to implement it.

jaredsohn3• 13 years ago

Chrome uses the Pepper Flash player now which gives more fine-tuned control over audio. This functionality is likely possible to build now.

tmrmn• 13 years ago

Unfortunately it shows as playing by default, which is obviously not true if you have ’Click to Play’ enabled in Chrome (load plugins on demand).

jaredsohn3• 13 years ago

Funny timing. I noticed this first after I updated Chrome and thought it was a part of their new audio indicators feature which might have been a part of the release.

While researching this I discovered that you can see audio indicators right now (even in the stable release) by including "–enable-audible-notifications" in the commandline when running the program.

look_lookatme• 13 years ago

I'll be damned.

http://i.imgur.com/kD1XAxm.gif

jcampbell1• 13 years ago

My understanding is that Chrome wants to roll out this feature, but there is no way to know if various plugins, including flash, are playing audio. If they show an indicator for only html5 A/V it will seem like a half-broken feature.

JoshTriplett• 13 years ago

Chrome has its own "native" flash implementation, maintained by Google; no reason they couldn't add a hook to notify the browser about audio playback.

spyder2• 13 years ago

The "-enable-audible-notifications" is working with flash audio and it is in chrome since months.

mmhd• 13 years ago

Soundcloud has done this from the beginning. Nothing new here, move along.

hamburglar• 13 years ago

Bandcamp does it too (Soundcloud did it first, though), but it's still nice to see it catching on.

dsuriano• 13 years ago

This is one thing I like about Safari. When you open a new tab it won't start playing the video until you select it.

speeder• 13 years ago

I wish there was a way to track who is making noise INSIDE a page.

I have two issues, one is some news websites that autoplay videos on random parts of the page.

The other, more annoying, is video websites (for example to watch fansubbed anime) that have ads that the ad author (not the side) somehow hidden it... Once I even found it, opening the inspector and looking around, but sometimes a page is ridicously complex that it is easy to just close it, and find another site.

guidopallemans• 13 years ago

why don't they just change the red and white play-icon to a pause icon?

raldi• 13 years ago

Changing the title also helps people who open everything in new windows.

citizenkeys2• 13 years ago

This is a simple javascript that adds a unicode "▶" to the beginning of html page title. This can be easily coded using the youtube javascript api. Just add the following code when the youtube playstate changes to "YT.PlayerState.PLAYING".

The js basically looks like this: function onPlayerStateChange(event) { var player = event.target; switch (event.data) { case YT.PlayerState.PLAYING: document.title = '▶' + document.title; break; } }

jaredsohn3• 13 years ago

FYI, if you implement this code for real, you'll need to make sure the symbol doesn't get repeated upon multiple plays and that it gets removed when not playing.

Edit: This is two different bugs. It means that if you are not playing, it will still look like it is playing and if you play multiple times, you will see the symbol get duplicated.

Edit 2: Code should be like this:

var documentTitle = document.title; function onPlayerStateChange(event) { var player = event.target; switch (event.data) { case YT.PlayerState.PLAYING: document.title = '▶' + documentTitle; break; default: document.title = documentTitle } }

but it assumes that the document title doesn't otherwise change.

artursapek2• 13 years ago

That's two ways of saying the same thing

citizenkeys2• 13 years ago

In practice, the youtube api has other cases in that switch expression (ENDED, PAUSED, etc). For those, you would use the following in their case statement: document.title = document.title.replace("\u25B6","");

And to revise my original code, this is what you could use in the PLAYING statement to prevent multiple play symbols: document.title = "\u25B6" + document.title.replace("\u25B6","");

Notice, too, that I replaced the "▶" with the appropriate javascript encoding.

ndesaulniers• 13 years ago

I just noticed this watching Carmack's Quake Con talks!

iamshs2• 13 years ago

This is a welcome change. But now my youtube history URLs in awesome bar of FF all have the unicode character of the "play" sign. Can there be a more elegant implementation, and even click to play plugin won't have any effect as this poster notes [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6153349

mkartic• 13 years ago

I wish they'd fix the buffering issues.

frncscgmz• 13 years ago

I'm a little disappointed. When I noticed the play icon on the tab I rejoiced and thought that was an actual control for pausing/resuming on the tab.

Sadly that wasn't the case.

mbesto• 13 years ago

Hypem has had this feature for a long time now! Very cool:

http://hypem.com/

netmute• 13 years ago

How about not autoplaying the video as soon as I open the page? I frequently open multiple pages in background tabs and Youtube makes this rather annoying.

spyder2• 13 years ago

Or it should play only when you switch to the tab.

tbirdz• 13 years ago

How long until "Method for adding an indicator to show if a web page is playing audio" is patented?

dep_b• 13 years ago

I really don't know why I still have to suffer from unmutable Flash, immediately starting music and videos without any possibility to have it to shut up by default. Just ask me:

This page wants to play audio, would you like to hear it? Yes / No [V] Remember for the next times

The funny thing is that soundcloud and youtube behave very well in this respect. Apparently the biggest audio sites (just look at the amount of music on youtube!) don't need to start blasting without any user interaction.

jsmeaton• 13 years ago

Click-to-play plugins in browser settings not enough?

YouTube adds Play icon to page titles so you can see which tabs are making noise

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