Reviews for AutoMute
AutoMute by danBhentschel
1 review
- Rated 4 out of 5by VanguardLH, 8 years agoI like the change of default from having to mute a tab (after getting blared by unexpected audio) to letting me decide if a page will play audio. For example, when I visit a Youtube page, the audio is way too loud (my volume level is only at 20% but I've got a potent powered speaker set that I don't want to lower their volume because other players would become too faint). Having the new tab auto-muted means I can move the volume slider for the video to midway and then unmute the tab. You'd think with my age that I'd go a bit more deaf like other old folks but I find that I don't like loud audio.
Mozilla really should add a browser.newtab.mute setting (0 = mute new tab, 1 = unmute new tab) in about:config settings. Of course, if they did then this extension wouldn't be needed for something missing in Firefox. They did add the audio icon to each tab so you could tell which ones were playing audio and let you click on that icon to mute that tab. However, that assume users want to opt-in on audio for every new tab. Lots of users want a quiet web browser session until they choose to listen to the noise. They added Click-to-Play for Flash so the user could choose when to opt-in to that media content. I was surprised they didn't add Click-to-Hear or, as with this add-on, allow users to switch from the current opt-in-by-default to opt-out-by-default.
Can anyone see the toolbar icon for this addon? The Firefox toolbar is a pale blue. This add-on's icon color is pale yellow. After installing the add-on, I thought something was wrong because I couldn't see its toolbar icon. I realized the other icons had moved over a bit. Squinting hard at the toolbar got me to see, yep, there was a toolbar icon for AutoMute. But, geez, the contrast could only be worse if the author chose pale blue for the icon's color to have it completely disappear in the toolbar. I'm using the Aero theme in Windows 7 which does use some less than stellar contrasting elements - but pale yellow on pale blue? Depending on Windows theme and perhaps browser coloring, the author should provide a choice of different icons. A dark green (when unmuted) that changes to dark to medium red (when muted) would have much better contrast.
About the only additional feature (may not be possible with extensions) is to add a normalize option so loud sounds are softened and soft sounds are emphasized. Audio at Youtube vary wildly depending on the mic or input source the author used to add audio to their video. In fact, so many like to add an intro melody that blares away while their oral portion is much softer.
Very glad the author chose to development a WebExtension (WE) version of his extension. FF 57 is only a couple months away that will block the use of legacy extensions. I want to start preparing for the WE requirement rather than get stuck in catastrophic recovery mode scurrying to find replacements when FF 57 comes out.