Imagine that you’ve a whole bunch of browser windows open, each with a handful of tabs. Then one of those many tabs starts producing sound. How do you find it?
You can turn off all of the browser’s sound, but then you can’t listen to anything through the browser.
Aside from hunting it down or even breaking the bad habit of leaving so many windows open, what’s the solution? Is there an app for this?
The big three browsers (Safari, Chrome, Firefox) all put little speakers playing sound icons in the tab for any tabs that are playing sound, at least for me.
The TidBITS tab is the front-most tab, the YouTube tab is playing a video (that’s in Firefox, Chrome and Safari are similar).
Unfortunately I can’t see any indication at the window level, but at least showing in the tabs helps somewhat.
I’ve wondered the same. Unfortunately, if you tend to keep a lot of tabs open, the speaker icon is hidden.
Identifying tabs actively playing audio would be a neat little utility.
This is trivial to do in Safari. If there’s audio playing in any tab, all windows will show a little speaker icon in the right of the address bar. Click and hold on it and you get a list of all tabs playing sound. Select the item from the list and Safari switches to that tab. In the below screenshot I have audio playing in a tab in a different window, but it shows up in the address bar of the tab in the front window.
In Firefox the tab menu (downward pointing chevron on the right of the tab bar) has full names of tabs and has the speaker icon for any that are playing, so the width of the tabs doesn’t matter. In Chrome on the top right of whatever that bar with the URL in it is called, there’s a music staff with note icon when something’s playing with a list of everything playing where you can even control things. I know that works with X and YouTube, don’t know about other sites. I don’t know of an equivalent in Safari but I hardly ever use Safari (edit: haha, in a simultaneous post @jzw shows the Safari option).
Aha! This sounds like what I was hoping to find. Thanks @jzw.
Great tips! Thanks, everyone!
Perhaps I’m doing something wrong?
In my Firefox, clicking that chevron shows all the tabs in that particular window. How do I get it to show me what might be the audio playing if it is in a tab in a different window?
And of course, I usually have several dozen windows open at a time ….
