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I am essentially asking for a Firefox equivalent to the Chrome extension called MuteTab - a way to identify which tabs are making sounds and then mute them accordingly.

Is there a such extension for Firefox? Any other ideas?

This would be especially helpful with websites that sit in the background and then sneak up on you and start making sounds, like with ads. You would have to go through all 100 tabs to find the guilty one and terminate it.

I have noticed that the forum section at Tom's Hardware can start playing embedded videos and make disturbing sound this way when you are not currently viewing tab it's on, even though you have not refreshed the page (although it looks like they automatically refresh the page for you after a given time).

Flashmute and Flashblock are mentioned as alternatives. But they don't really work the same way as MuteTab. Even Mozillazine mentions these tools for in-browser muting of tabs. Trying to download Flashmute only results in Cannot GET /flashmute.aspx. I don't think it's maintained anymore. And Flashblock completely blocks Flash content.

Sources:

kenorb
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Samir
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4 Answers4

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I would suggest avoiding the issue altogether by preventing video/music from automatically playing. Here are three things you can do (together or separately) to help prevent auto playing video/sound.

  1. Install AdBlock Plus, which will block most advertisements including those that automatically start playing video/sound.

  2. Go to about:config and set media.autoplay.enabled to false. This supposedly stops HTML5 media from autoplaying, though I couldn't find any references to it in the about:config entries on MozillaZine Knowledge Base.

  3. Go to about:config and set plugins.click_to_play to true. As you can see, it stopped Youtube from auto-playing this annoying video.

    I got 99 problems, but a Bieber ain't one

Drew Chapin
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4

Track https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=486262 for Firefox's response.
Also see http://blog.ffextensionguru.com/2014/01/31/why-firefox-wont-have-a-noisy-tabs-feature/ for an opinion on why this may never happen.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/click-to-play-per-element/ is a little add-on that can be helpful in avoiding the surprise-sound tab issue.

WBT
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1

I just found an add-on called "Tabhunter". It has a checkbox at the bottom of the dialog labelled "Audio Only". When this box is checked, the box above it will list all tabs that are currently playing audio!!! COOL!! Just double-click on a link in the list and it will take you to that tab so you can pause it. Tabhunter https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabhunter/?src=search

I also found an add-on called "Mute Tab" which does mute all tabs. However, I suspect that the audio is still playing in all those tabs, so some processing power is probably being wasted. I like the Tabhunter better since it can give you a list of tab links for tabs currently playing audio. Mute Tab https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mute-tab/?src=search

Mike Price
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You can now download the Muter add-on (currently for PC only). Once installed it adds a mute button into the add-on bar in the lower right corner. For Chrome use extension MuteTab.

See: Which Tab In Firefox is Playing Sound?

kenorb
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Dave
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