334987 - Only play plugin sounds from current tab/window

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, enhancement)

Description

[Lloyd Wood]

You have a bunch of tabs and windows open. One of them is playing music. But which one? Try and find it and close that tab without quitting your browser. Even worse when there's two or more tabs and sound sources in the mix.

Firefox needs a 'play sounds only from frontmost tab/window' option. This would help greatly -- try e.g. tabbed browsing of www.myspace.com to see how painful this can get.

A window listing sound sources by tab would be very useful, as would a loudspeaker icon on a tab that wants to play sounds.

Comment 1

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

This would need some pretty extensive plugin API changes, I think. I believe that in most cases, the plugin is playing the sound itself (not through Mozilla), so getting them to know about which tab is "current" would be problematic, I think. 

Comment 2

[jorgen jorgensen]

You're right - but the fact that ie is using tabbed browsing from now on
could perhaps persuade the plug-in makers into allowing the browser to
signal the plug-in or something.

Comment 3

[Tracy Walker [:tracy]]

seeing this on Mac with 3.0

Comment 5

[Biju]

(from Bug 449336)
what if user want his/her favorite radio station to be played in background
while he is working/browsing at a different site.

Comment 6

[jorgen jorgensen]

I hadn't thought of that - but having all play, would be a kakofonia anyway (is it called that?), so i think pros beat cons.

current tab would be good - or total silence (letting another browser window play - and thereby taking care of your user)

Comment 9

[Biju]

may be we need a "PLAY WHILE IN BACKGROUND" button on the browser

Comment 11

[Lloyd Wood]

It should be possible to nominate which tab has the right to speak.

Options could be:
- sound from only the currently frontmost tab.
- sound from only the tab I select (via a menu option, tab is marked somehow with speaker icon)

Other tabs wanting to output sound can show a blinking speaker icon. to gain attention.

But the above doesn't handle a scrolling list of tabs where a blinking speaker icon alert (say, you're playing instantchess and it's your move - beep) is no longer visible, so a beep has to be output anyway, and doesn't distinguish between something creating alert interruptions and outright cacophony.

Comment 12

[Hans Schmucker]

Seems I'm responsible for yet another dupe... : #551154

"When a video or audio element is playing back in a tab that is currently not
visible, it continues to output audio. Since no indicators show which tab is
playing the sound finding the tab is often almost impossible.

Disabling sound on hidden tabs would solve this. Of course there are cases
where you'd want the sound to continue (for example a online radio service),
but frankly these cases are relatively rare and do not outweigh the annoyance
of having to manually locate and pause a running video/audio.
Users would still be able to keep something running in the background by
opening the page in a separate window (dragging the tab to the desktop), which
I think would be quite intuitive: Keep it visible to keep it playing.

Pausing any video/audio element would be ideal, but I'm afraid that would
interfere to much with the page playing the video/audio, so I'd vote for just
silencing it.

Alternatively, the UI could be enhanced to display a marker for a tab playing
sound, but I think that would lead to too much clutter on the tab bar..."

Comment 14

[Rob]

In https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=551124 I complained:


User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US;
rv:1.9.2.2pre) Gecko/20100221 Namoroka/3.6.2pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US;
rv:1.9.2.2pre) Gecko/20100221 Namoroka/3.6.2pre

RFE: 

We need the ability to identify which Tab(s) have audio playing.

When restoring a prior session with many Tabs open some Tabs may have audio (or
a video with audio) that had finished playing in the prior session.

These will ALL play together when the Browser is restarted. It can be difficult
to go through many (20+) Tabs to locate ALL the audio and video and terminate
the playing of each to keep one (or none) playing.

If the Tabs were tinted or flashed until selected (IF they had audio playing)
we could locate them fast and stop the audio in the Window from playing. A menu
checkbox to enable or disable this feature would be great if the audio had a
silent part and then looped only to play several tracks all at once again. :(

This is especially troublesome with "Tab Saver" extensions like TabMix+.

Rob

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
RFE

--------------------

One easy(?) fix would be to have a 'Menu Option' under [Tools][Options], subheading under "Contents" or "Advanced" with a means to select the Audio Output Driver (as in the Reaper 3.35 http://www.cockos.com/reaper/download.php Program).

Then we could use JackAudio http://www.jackaudio.org/ which works fairly well under WinXP, it also supports other OSes. 

Jack is versatile, in theory you could have the audio from different Tabs play through different speakers (with Surround Sound System) and ACTUALLY hear _ALL_ the Tabs play their own Audio at the same time; just like being in a room with several people talking and a radio playing in the corner ...


Here is a quote from the site that says why this (type of fix, Jack or something better) is the solution:

[Quote]
Have you ever wanted to take the audio output of one piece of software and send it to another? How about taking the output of that same program and send it to two others, then record the result in the first program? Or maybe you're a programmer who writes real-time audio and music applications and who is looking for a cross-platform API that enables not only device sharing but also inter-application audio routing, and is incredibly easy to learn and use? If so, JACK may be what you've been looking for.

JACK is system for handling real-time, low latency audio (and MIDI). It runs on GNU/Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, OS X and Windows (and can be ported to other POSIX-conformant platforms). It can connect a number of different applications to an audio device, as well as allowing them to share audio between themselves. Its clients can run in their own processes (ie. as normal applications), or can they can run within the JACK server (ie. as a "plugin"). JACK also has support for distributing audio processing across a network, both fast & reliable LANs as well as slower, less reliable WANs.

JACK was designed from the ground up for professional audio work, and its design focuses on two key areas: synchronous execution of all clients, and low latency operation.
[/Quote]

Rob

Comment 16

[Martin Krieger]

> Bug 556969 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug.

Well, but I have to add that my use case is related but different. I'd like to mute those annoying 'marketing' sounds on way too many web sites - even if they are in the foremost tab.

So I am a strong supporter of a new plug-in format with a sound API for sound.

Comment 17

[Igor Velkov]

Property of every tab "play sound in background" + property "every tab can play soud by default" + property "inherite play sound in background property from the parent tab".
list of sites who can play by default
list of sites who can't play by default

Using computer, internet and gui desktop with sound from ~1996, have topic problem 2 ot 3 times. But very often use background sound from browser.

Comment 18

[Rob]

(In reply to comment #16)
> > Bug 556969 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug.
> 
> Well, but I have to add that my use case is related but different. I'd like to
> mute those annoying 'marketing' sounds on way too many web sites - even if they
> are in the foremost tab.
> 
> So I am a strong supporter of a new plug-in format with a sound API for sound.

Will this help you:

Stop Autoplay
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1765/

Rob

Comment 22

[Lloyd Wood]

Bug 334987 is five years old today!

Happy birthday, Bug 334987!

May you have many more long and fulfilling years in unaddressed and unresolved NEW status, Bug 334987!

Comment 23

[Liam K.]

A temporary workaround is to use TubeStop, which makes the problem a lot easier to handle.

Comment 25

[Rob]

YousableTubeFix is a Greasemonkey script for Gecko browsers (like Firefox) to enhance the YouTube video sharing site. A port for Opera users is available here, and one for Chrome users.
 

YousableTubeFix - By Mindeye — Last update Apr 25, 2012 — Installed 642,254 times.
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/13333

Many new features for YT including: "Prevent only video autoplay, or both video autoplay and autobuffering (video and user channel pages)".


Thus, an entire rewrite of a portion of FF's Code is not needed; while we wait we can install YousableTubeFix. After someone takes a peek at how it works it (the turn off autoplay feature) could easily be added to FF.

Comment 26

[Christopher C. Mills]

The gist of this problem is well described in many of these comments. A solution should be engineered after the various points made in the comments are distilled down to a set of requirements:

A Use Case:

You are on a tab and adjust NoScript. It refreshes all tabs containing the URL Allowed/Disallowed. These tabs can be anywhere. Some of them might play video or sound. You can't find them. You might be on Netflix tab as your forefront window. So you want sound from that tab. You might have music playing in the background. So you might want sound from whatever tab is playing it even if it isn't visible. You just want to shut off any other sources rapidly.

My distilled requirements:

1) At a minimum, need to be able to rapidly identify any tab across any window that is playing any kind of sound.
2) Need to be able to rapidly disable sound from this tab, either by control from where you are or by a rapid jump to the source to manually disable. I am fine with the latter, personally. Just get me quickly to the tab so that I can pause it.

Comment 27

[Sveta]

another use case requiring separate tab-volume controls is "ad avoidance"

user is watching a show and 5 times an hour there are ads for 4 or 7 minutes.
It would be nice to mute the tab on which the show (and ad) is playing
so that some other tab can be brought up and take control of audio

of course it would be nice to have a complete ad-avoidance system but if a user
has to put up with the 4-7 minute break then at least give users the choice to 
mute the ad

there should be a panel with a radio box for each tab open, and user should be able
to check off AS MANY TABS AS USER WANTS SOUND. If there are 10 tabs, user could select
2 tabs. One for the radio which it is desired to play ALL THE TIME AS BACKGROUND MUSIC
and another one where actual use is taking place

Comment 28

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

At this point we don't expect to fix this as Adobe is unlikely to support this with Flash.
If things change here we will revisit this at a later time.

Note that this is only about plugins, not about web-content like HTML5 videos. We should push for more content to move to better formats in the mean-time.

Comment 29

[Mitar]

Hm, HTML5 videos can also play sound and you might now know where it is coming from? There is no indicator in the tab that some HTML5 video is playing a sound in that tab?

Comment 30

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

Yes, that is a separate issue. This bug was about plugins.

Comment 31

[Mitar]

Which one is that issue? What's its number?

Comment 32

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

(In reply to Mitar from comment #31)
> Which one is that issue? What's its number?

Bug 486262.

Comment 33

[u491644]

Actually the original problem was about sounds, the OP didn't say anything about plug-ins.  

"Plug-ins" was how someone else categorized it.

Now that sounds can come from HTML (no plug-ins) the categorization is incorrect.

"Lloyd Wood 2006-04-21 12:06:29 PDT
You have a bunch of tabs and windows open. One of them is playing music. But which one? Try and find it and close that tab without quitting your browser. Even worse when there's two or more tabs and sound sources in the mix.

Firefox needs a 'play sounds only from frontmost tab/window' option. This would help greatly -- try e.g. tabbed browsing of www.myspace.com to see how painful this can get.
A window listing sound sources by tab would be very useful, as would a loudspeaker icon on a tab that wants to play sounds.
Comment 1"

And as far as sounds from FlashPlayer go, has anyone even bothered to ask Adobe if they'd add whatever is needed?

This something that would greatly enhance Firefox, it is enough of a bother that it might entice some people away from Chrome if Firefox had it.

Comment 34

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

There is other bugs on the non-plugin parts of this.
It would be great to have this for plugins too and it wasn't just dismissed plainly, but this is unlikely to happen at this point.

Comment 35

[u665825]

Since i stumbled over this bug,
for those interested, here is an addon that might be useful

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mute-unfocused-tabs

It has an option to temporary allow background audio from tab (via a toolbar button)
and a whitelist to permanently allow it (preference page).

Hope it helps.