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?
It's almost entirely due to ads, and this exact problem drove me to using adblock after years of avoiding it. Sometimes it just happens in the background at random, and sometimes it happens when loading bookmark groups.
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.
There's been a number of ads and things on pages like cnn.com that'll start playing something to make noise, while being below the fold just so you'll have to go looking for it to stop it. I've seen it go in and out in cycles depending on the page and what you view.
I guess I just don't use my browser the same way. I don't typically have more than 15-20 tabs open but I very rarely have a tab open that I'm unaware of. I must also manage to avoid all the annoying sites that use ads that play automatically. I don't use adblock or noscript and I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've had an ad play on its own. And it was always pretty easy to spot and rectify.
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 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?
The thing that springs to mind relating relating to the music problem is: tumblr blogs. I've been a few times in a situation that I opened a tumblr blog (fandom blog) to read some news about a TV show, just to forget about the tab later. It sometimes takes a few minutes for the files to download (not sure why either, maybe there is an artificial delay added) and they start playing randomly, and then you're left wondering what the hell is happening. Granted, it happened only once or twice.
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?