1446799 - Option to hide "muted" icon if tab does not currently play any audio

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(WebExtensions :: Frontend, enhancement)

Description

[rotemdan]

Attachment: all_muted_tabs.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:59.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/59.0
Build ID: 20180315233128

Steps to reproduce:

1. Install extension to mute all sites by default: 

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mute-sites-by-default/


Actual results:

All tabs show the muted icon regardless of whether any audio is played within them:

https://imgur.com/vFq7KnL




Expected results:

It would be great to have a way to only show the "muted" icon for muted sites that are currently playing audio:

1. There is currently no way to differentiate between a muted tab containing playing audio that's being silenced and one that is generally muted but is not actually trying to produce any sound.

2. It looks cluttered (especially with the addon I linked) and doesn't provide much useful information, since no actual audio is being silenced -- if any was, then the icon would have indicated that and the user would have realized it was actively muted.

Comment 1

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Moving to WebExt to evaluate this there.

Comment 2

[Caitlin Neiman [:caitmuenster]]

Hi rotemdan, this bug has been added to the agenda for the WebExtensions APIs triage on July 10, 2018. Would you be able to join us? 

Here’s a quick overview of what to expect at the triage: 

* We normally spend 5 minutes per bug
* The more information in the bug, the better
* The goal of the triage is to give a general thumbs up or thumbs down on a proposal; we won't be going deep into implementation details

Relevant Links: 

* Wiki for the meeting: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/Triage#Next_Meeting
* Meeting agenda: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Y_oYPldTT_kQOOouyJbC-8y3ASIizScLKFRhQfsDQWI/edit#heading=h.mr8julfcusgv
* Vision doc for WebExtensions: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/Vision

Comment 3

[Mike Conca [:mconca]]

This was discussed during the July 10, 2018 meeting. Outcome:

This is the expected behavior. If you manually right-click on a tab and select Mute Tab, you see the "muted" icon even if the tab is not currently making sound.  Performing this action with the WebExtension API simply invokes the same thing programmatically. To have a different behavior between extensions and user input is not desirable. Any request to change the default behavior in Firefox should be directed to the Firefox front-end team via a separate bug.