Everyone can now track down noisy tabs

http://chrome.blogspot.com/2014/01/everyone-can-now-track-down-noisy-tabs.html

by cleverjake • 13 years ago

137 108 13 years ago

chrome.blogspot.com

ereckers• 13 years ago

Now if you can just mute it directly from the tab they'd really be onto something.

JTon• 13 years ago

Agreed. This is a good start though. It's features like this that makes the utilitarian in me nod in approval.

joshdick• 13 years ago

You can: by closing the tab.

Which is what I plan to do to any tab that plays sound I didn't ask for.

deletes2• 13 years ago

I would prefer preventing audio + video to start on a tab that is not selected.

JoshTriplett• 13 years ago

That would also prevent using a web browser to run a music player in the background.

valarauca12• 13 years ago

Does a similar feature exist in firefox? Or even as an addon?

Several searches couldn't yield a result.

sleazebreeze2• 13 years ago

In Windows 7 at least, Firefox breaks out each tab into its own subpanel in the Volume Mixer and each instance of Flash (for example) that might be producing sound. It's pretty easy from there to determine which tab is making a racket.

jaredsohn7• 13 years ago

Really? My understanding was the IE was the only major browser that would use multiple Flash instances. You may have just noticed a difference between HTML5 audio/HTML5 video/web audio and sound from plug-ins. (I can check later when near a Windows box.)

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.)

conductor• 13 years ago

Here is the feature request in Firefox's Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=486262

padenot2• 13 years ago

So, I've got a little hacky patch that _kind of_ does that, but only for <video> and <audio>, because we don't have access to flash's source code, so we can't hook into it. This (only <audio> + <video> + Web Audio these days) is not really hard to do, I can guide a volunteer if someone feels like writing the patch (or part of it, even).

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.

valarauca12• 13 years ago

if you could contact me via email I'd be interested in trying.

est• 13 years ago

I've been thinking about dll interception stuff

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.

jaredsohn7• 13 years ago

It would be great if a JavaScript-based Flash (such as Shumway) gets to the point where it works well enough for a large number of audio sources. I imagine then sound would show up to the browser as HTML5 audio or webaudio, which could then be tracked.

junto• 13 years ago

As a parent I was more interested in the "supervised users" feature to monitor your children's internet usage. Parents desperately need something simple to help them make sure that their children are safe on the internet.

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-...

jack-r-abbit7• 13 years ago

Same here. I didn't realize tabs playing music was such a rampant problem that needed to be addressed. The supervised users feature has a lot of appeal to me as well. My kids' computer (Mac Mini) has Chrome set as the default browser. I'll need to look into this more closely.

sentenza• 13 years ago

Initially, I also wondered how many people have the noise problem. So far, the only way I managed to maneuver myself into that situation in Firefox is by having a few hundred tabs open (enough to make FF become sluggish and unresponsive) and then clicking around too much in an unresponsive interval. In that situation, I'd end up with some tabs, unknown to me, that I had accidentally clicked, which then start playing youtube videos.

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?

271828182842• 13 years ago

Same here. I didn't realize tabs playing music was such a rampant problem

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.

avighnay2• 13 years ago

Echoes with all parents for sure

CamperBob22• 13 years ago

Not all. As a kid, I was taught that information wasn't dangerous.

imperialWicket• 13 years ago

Supervised users are definitely awesome for kids, but I'm also planning to try it out as a replacement for my current /etc/hosts hack for keeping away from time-sucking sites.

daremo_2• 13 years ago

"On the desktop, we’ve updated the default styling of UI elements like form controls and scrollbars"

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

joering2• 13 years ago

Was about to say but didnt want to hijack the topic. Also there is plenty of problems with low-level graphics cards rendering links and bold text. It looks very blurry now.

binarycrusader2• 13 years ago

I'm surprised this doesn't interfere with accessibility guidelines.

cpeterso2• 13 years ago

Chrome's scrollbar changes or the non-native Aura UI itself?

dmunoz• 13 years ago

From the issue tracker:

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.

codezero2• 13 years ago

Can anyone explain the use case for the arrows as opposed to using keyboard arrows?

Removing them seems like a great step, but I might be brainwashed by the fact that Mac OS has done away with them already.

daremo_2• 13 years ago

I don't care much for the arrows. The main issue for me is the lack of consistency with other native Windows applications, and that this also affects other widgets such as check boxes, radio buttons and drop down menus, which now feature a horrible fade animation.

drv• 13 years ago

I am surprised at the number of people using the scrollbar arrows.

The new scrollbars are annoyingly thin and hard to see, though.

joshschreuder• 13 years ago

It's really horrible, here's the same radio group in Firefox and new Chrome:

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.

Grue3• 13 years ago

Chrome's renderer has always been extraordinarily ugly coming from Firefox. HTML Forms and font rendering specifically.

jeorgun• 13 years ago

Wait, did they just release the Aura/ChromeOS desktop as a Metro app?

zastrowm• 13 years ago

It kind of seems that way. I was wondering the same thing so I tried out - sure enough, launching it in metro mode and it looks like what I expect ChromeOS would be (I don't actually have a device running ChromeOS), with an apps bar, a clock, and "start/apps" button.

Magi604• 13 years ago

I noticed this not too long ago. It's a very welcome addition since there are so many audio/video ads that autoplay these days.

jackocnr• 13 years ago

Finally! I have wanted this feature since I started using tabs, about 10 years ago. Yet another win for Chrome.

nfoz• 13 years ago

Alternatively, we could have designed the web so that autoplay of audio/video isn't a thing.

TazeTSchnitzel• 13 years ago

Autoplay provides better UX for some sites, though.

noname123• 13 years ago

Good feature, but to take it one step further. I'd like to request an auto-mute feature filtered by domain names. Why?

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!

jcampbell1• 13 years ago

This feature should be implemented as an extension. The only reasonable thing to request in the project tracker is to have the audio status available in the extension api.

swamp40• 13 years ago

Why don't they just give you the option to only play the video/audio when the tab is active?

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.

acqq• 13 years ago

Exactly: let the user decide "I need this thing to keep playing music/video in the background." But unless he enables it, play it only when it's topmost.

zavi• 13 years ago

Lots of people stream Pandora and YouTube in background. Few people use new windows. Adding a control for users to decide would sacrifice simplicity of UX.

nairteashop• 13 years ago

Does someone know how this feature works?

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."

piyush_soni• 13 years ago

This is Brilliant! My reasons to continue using Firefox are reducing by day :(.

laureny• 13 years ago

This only goes half way, sadly: noisy tabs will only be shown with the symbol in your Window list if they are the active window in that tab. If you have another tab open, it's that tab that will appear there, so you will still have to hunt down all your windows and then look for a tab with the symbol.

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.

ChristianMarks• 13 years ago

Excellent. Could have used this feature when AOL acquired the Huffington Post.

operanotgoogle• 13 years ago

what's with the submission's titles ? This one is obviously marketing aka false. I'm using opera on linux to browse the web, how a new feature in chrome affects me ?

jaredsohn7• 13 years ago

The submission title comes from the source webpage. (Look at the source URL for context.) It says "everyone" because the previous announcement was that people using the beta version had this feature.

deepak365• 13 years ago

This works well in Ubuntu too.

unicornporn• 13 years ago

So, if I'm researching and I have ~40 tabs open, what will be visible? I already have trouble seing the tab titles.

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...

dredmorbius5• 13 years ago

Close but no cigar.

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.

makmanalp• 13 years ago

I can't help but wonder if it's too late for that at this point. Users expect a page to be "loading" while they're not looking at it. Loading and running both swf and javascript often takes part as the initialization of the page. It's frustrating to a user when they open multiple tabs and expect them to be loaded by the time they switch to one, but the page is just now starting to load.

Maybe this is a symptom of the fact that loading orders, preloading, etc isn't built into the standard, but is hacked on top?

dredmorbius5• 13 years ago

So, how about this happens: I add a link to my reading queue. This _downloads the content_ but then saves it to cache. The page isn't rendered. It doesn't even open as a tab, but as some sort of reading queue, linked by context to where I opened it from, date, and other related metadata, plus more I can add (tags, etc.), later.

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.

espadrine• 13 years ago

Those are points that would be great, formatted in a Firefox bug (or rather, enhancement request).

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.

dredmorbius5• 13 years ago

I gave up on Firefox (sobbing, I might add) when I found 1) it would bog out hopelessly with the tab loads I was throwing at it 2) all the worse when I was running Chrome in parallel (which is worse for memory management but allows me to reclaim it usually by killing off tabs), and 3) I got hooked on Stylebot for restyling websites.

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.

drdaeman• 13 years ago

So, assuming I'm using Chrome, how do I download malicious file now? (Assuming, I know it's malware but still want to download it, say, for further dissection.)

mnw21cam• 13 years ago

wget. curl. Seriously, if you're dealing with malicious files, you don't want some massive software package interacting with it. Attack surface area, and all that.

Everyone can now track down noisy tabs

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