True to the headline at Slate, it appears that Google really did just fix one of the most annoying things about web surfing. Few things drive me as crazy as the sudden blast of an advertisement from somewhere deep in the chaos that is my 40-open-at-any-given-time tabs. The one thing that drives me crazier is trying to figure out which tab the sound is coming from. Sometimes it seems there’s a timer built into the HTML or some shit that tells ads or videos to start playing after 15 minutes of inactivity and I’ll be deep into something totally different than I was when I first opened the tab and literally jump out of my chair. Really, this is why I try to remember to keep my volume on mute at all times, but I often forget.
I’ve trained myself to look for the usual suspects: That red ‘S’ that indicates Salon, or the ‘H’ that represents The Huffington Post, or I’ll look for unfamiliar local news or aggregation sites I may have pulled up when researching something. But sometimes there are so many tiny little tabs open that I simply have no idea what I’ve been reading and, often, end up frantically clicking the x on the each tab from right to left, hoping that I’ll kill the noise without losing anything important.
In a beta feature, Google “now shows a small speaker icon next to whichever tab is playing sound.” This could be a game-changer. A life-saver. A sound killer app. I like that. One more reason Chrome is a superior browser. Thanks, Google!
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