Firefox devs testing feature to find and nuke noisy tabs

One of my favorite features in Google Chrome is the noisy tab indicator and the early trial feature that mutes noisy tabs with one click....

One of my favorite features in Google Chrome is the noisy tab indicator and the early trial feature that mutes noisy tabs with one click. Now, that same feature is coming to Mozilla Firefox—or at least, we hope it is. Mozilla developers are actively testing and designing a noise indicator that appears on a browser tab when audio is playing.
Whether the noisy tab indicator will actually make it to the mainstream version of Firefox is unclear. But I was able to grab an early test build of Firefox to see how the feature is developing.

Hands-on with Firefox’s very early mute noisy tabs feature

Firefox developers are working on a mute noisy tabs feature.

Similar to Chrome’s implementation, Firefox’s early trials display a noise indicator in your browser tab. If you want to mute the audio, you hover over the noise indicator, right-click it and select Mute Tab. Boom! No more noise. The mute feature also works even if the noisy tab isn’t the active page.
In the test build that I tried, this feature only works with HTML5-based videos and not Flash. However, developers are working on implementing the ability to detect Flash audio for Windows and Mac users.

As the feature stands right now it feels like a bit of a cheat. In my tests, the browser simply pauses the video when you hit the Mute Tab option. Oddly, the video pause is independent of the actual video player controls on the webpage itself.
UPDATE: The pause issue is a bug that will be fixed by the time this feature goes public.

The Mute Tab feature in a very early build of Firefox.

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In other words, if you try to play/pause the video with the usual player controls after you’ve hit the mute tab control, the video won’t start. To get the video going again you’ll have to unmute it first via the tab’s noise indicator.
It’s clear this feature isn’t ready for prime time yet—but that’s to be expected as the feature is only in the very early test phases. The important thing is simply that it’s being worked on.

The impact on you at home: It’s not clear when it might land in the stable version of Firefox. At this writing it wasn’t even available in the official nightly builds. However, considering how many people love this feature in Chrome, my guess is it’s highly likely the mute tab feature will become a standard feature of Firefox—as long as the development process doesn’t hit any major roadblocks.

ITWorld