Sometimes it is difficult to tell where audio playback is coming from in a browser. This is especially true in situations where you have dozens of tabs open already, or opened a bunch of websites at the same time in your browser of choice. I sometimes open ten or twenty websites in new tabs at the same time in Firefox using the excellent Multi Links add-on, and it can happen that audio starts playing as a consequence because at least one of the websites is running media contents or multimedia advertisement on its pages.
This is especially disturbing if I'm already listening to music or watching a video on the PC. The only two options available at this point in time is to either mute the web browser if you are using an operating system that allows you to do so, or flip through all tabs quickly to try and locate the tab or tabs that play the audio.
Google has integrated a new feature into Chromium that improves this scenario for the user considerable. The developers have added an audio indicator to Chrome that is displayed in tabs in the browser whenever audio is playing in a tab.
The indicator is animated so that it should not be a problem to locate the tab responsible for playing audio in the browser. Note that this is currently an experimental feature, and that it will only work on YouTube if the HTML5 trial is enabled.
The main reason for adding the audio indicator is a different one. Google plans to exclude tabs that play audio from being discarded when memory runs out. That feature however has not yet been integrated into the Chromium web browser.
Expect the audio indicator to land in Chrome Canary and Dev versions soon, and in the coming months in Chrome Beta and Stable builds. (Via Francois)
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I don't have it yet in Chromium Continuous Version 27.0.1422.0 (184378)
I already see it in Chrome Canary on Windows 7 on YouTube.
I look forward to when it is included in stable as I have a problem with a mysterious voice that starts up when I have about 10 tabs open. Some of the time stopping and starting Chrome gets rid of it for a while.
Ramesh. I hear voices too.