You know what really grinds my gears? Having 15 browser tabs open and one playing music and not knowing which one is playing music and having to scroll through all the tabs in order to find the one that’s playing music in order to kill it because it’s making you crazy and by the time you’ve killed it you’ve lost track of what you were working on in the first place so you have to thumb through all the tabs again just to get back to your work and by that time you can’t work BECAUSE YOU HAVE ALREADY THROWN YOUR LAPTOP OUT OF A SIX STORY WINDOW.
This noisy browser tab thing bugs me so much so that months ago I asked the universe in prayer, “Can someone please make a browser extension that tells you/kills whichever tab is making noise?” Well it looks like my request has been answered, finally, in the form of the Mute Tab Chrome extension.
Created by Jared Sohn, Mute Tab scans web pages for embed plugin HTML tags that are likely to make sound such as <object>, <applet>, <audio> or <video> and changes the icon on the tab of the possibly offending page to the Mute Tab musical note icon. You can then mute the app by right clicking on the page and selecting Mute, which either mutes it while it plays (Safe) or shuts off the plugin (Unsafe).
Mute Tab also lets you drill down into the precise details of what tabs could be making noise by clicking on the Mute Tab icon in your browser bar, showing what tags might be the culprit on each page. Unfortunately there’s no way to mute a Flash game without shutting down the game entirely (Sorry Farmville fans).
While it’s still impossible to tell exactly browser tabs are making noise (because of plugins like Flash running shared instances in Chrome), Mute Tab is a noble attempt at solving the #firstworldproblem by at least giving you a partial workaround to the whole “throwing your laptop out a window” thing. You’re welcome.
Via: Gizmodo