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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:

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    I guess we will have to wait another 3 years or so until the Firefox team decides this feature is necessary, or until someone makes a MuteTab equivalent for Firefox. If you know of any such project or finished but maybe not officially released add-on for Firefox please let me know. Another option is to switch to Chrome or just use Chrome for multi-tabbed browsing.
    – Samir
    Commented Jan 10, 2013 at 15:02
  • I guess there is some technical difficulty: ghacks.net/2014/01/15/…
    – huggie
    Commented Jun 23, 2014 at 2:50
  • Google Chrome shows it automatically.
    – kenorb
    Commented May 25, 2015 at 11:56

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
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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

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    It doesn't stop JavaScript from autoplaying something.
    – Display Name
    Commented Mar 17, 2015 at 5:22
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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.

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    As of firefox 42 this is implemented.
    – Andy
    Commented Jan 14, 2016 at 8:45
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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?

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  • That sounds like a good workaround, but I can't see this in the link. All I can see is a mention of a way to stop autoplay, and a mute button for the browser.
    – Sparhawk
    Commented Sep 6, 2013 at 2:04
  • Unfortunately, that's not what it does. Unless I'm missing something, it mutes Firefox altogether, including the tab that is in focus, and there's no way to change that. That's not very helpful, it just gives you the minor convenience of using a button in the browser instead of muting Firefox or Flash in sound mixer. If you actually want to hear the sound from the current tab, without having other tabs talking over it, this doesn't help.
    – Adi Inbar
    Commented Apr 6, 2015 at 21:34
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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

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  • Where can we get this add-on?  Please do not respond in comments; edit your answer to make it clearer and more complete.
    – Scott - Слава Україні
    Commented Dec 1, 2018 at 2:12
  • There is another addon: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/switch-to-audible-tab . Even though, if it's playing a loop like maybe called with javascript or so, it doesn't detect it. Youtube etc are detetcted effortleslly, cool if you have >300 tabs.
    – dr0i
    Commented Oct 15, 2019 at 19:02
  • Thanks for the "Tabhunter" recommendation, it did indeed help me with both issues of searching audio playing tabs and named tabs.
    – t0r0X
    Commented Sep 12, 2022 at 0:26

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