So, I've got a little hacky patch that _kind of_ does that, but only for <video> and <audio>, because we don't have access to flash's source code, so we can't hook into it. This (only <audio> + <video> + Web Audio these days) is not really hard to do, I can guide a volunteer if someone feels like writing the patch (or part of it, even).

I've been thinking about dll interception stuff to make it work with flash, but I'm not sure if it can be done reliably.

> I've been thinking about dll interception stuff

In Win7 you get audio volume per process option when you click the speaker tray icon. So the OS does know the process source of audio

Since Chrome is multi-process I think it's easy to identify the noisy process.

Just an idea.

He's talking about Firefox here. :)

But anyway, major browsers (other than IE) -- even when tab per process -- only use a single Flash process for all tabs, so you cannot distinguish at the operating system level. Chrome is now able to show audio indicators because Flash is embedded via a new kind of plug-in (Pepper) which allows them to track it.

Since Firefox knows which tabs embed Flash content and whether the Flash plugin process is playing audio, Firefox might be able to guess which tab is playing Flash audio. For example, if there is only one tab with Flash content. :)

But due to ads, if many tabs are open then many will have Flash on them. Run Chrome, install my MuteTab extension (http://www.mutetab.com/), open a few tabs, and look at the extension popup to get an idea of how pervasive Flash is. (However, if you also run Adblock then it becomes a little more reasonable, since you've greatly reduced the number of tabs playing with Flash on them.)

Yeah, you could look at which tabs were recently opened when sound started playing. But then once sound is playing, you won't be able to detect if another tab that plays sound was opened. And the sound might have come from a tab that had been open for awhile.

if you could contact me via email I'd be interested in trying.

padenot at mozilla dot com, or #media on irc.mozilla.org (French timezone, I'm padenot, there).

Here is the feature request in Firefox's Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=486262

In Windows 7 at least, Firefox breaks out each tab into its own subpanel in the Volume Mixer and each instance of Flash (for example) that might be producing sound. It's pretty easy from there to determine which tab is making a racket.

Really? My understanding was the IE was the only major browser that would use multiple Flash instances. You may have just noticed a difference between HTML5 audio/HTML5 video/web audio and sound from plug-ins. (I can check later when near a Windows box.)

Also, I'm generally curious about how IE is able to get away with this since I think the Chrome team said creating multiple Flash instances wasn't reliable because Flash wasn't designed for it in some way (in addition to eating a lot of memory.)

Apologies, I was wrong - that's what I get for posting without checking what I'd seen before. You are right, only one Flash instance shows up for multiple sources playing audio/video.

It would be great if a JavaScript-based Flash (such as Shumway) gets to the point where it works well enough for a large number of audio sources. I imagine then sound would show up to the browser as HTML5 audio or webaudio, which could then be tracked.