Ray Camden recently posted an entry to his blog that is a fantasic idea - A mute button for your web browser. His idea is simple and brilliant. Unfortunately the comments on his entry go every which way and people are posting about disabling Macromedia Flash altogether, making a context menu item to mute an object, Flash designers making their animation silent by default, or muting the entire PC. All these ideas are wrong, but if you stay on topic it's a great idea.

How many of you play music / talk radio all day long on your computer (using WinAmp, iTunes, etc.), and are annoyed when you are browsing the web and all of a sudden there is additional music or talking on top of whatever you are currently trying to listen to. It's annoying as can be.

Now - if there was a browser feature or extension to mute the browser as a whole (this includes MIDI sounds, background sounds, embedding audio/video files such as Quick time movies, Real Media, Window Media Player, Macromedia Flash, etc).

Firefox does a builtiful job of blocking pop-up automatically, and displaying a little icon in the corner alerting me a popup was blocked, and gives me the open to display the popup if I wish. It boogles my mind sometimes that this tiny icon catches my attention and works so well, but it does.

Now... if it could so the same with audio feeds, and just display a simple icon saying that sound is blocked, and if you click on it, it will let the sound play. This feature would have to not interfere with any other applications. It would have to be browser window specific, and in the case of "tabbed" browsers (Moz, Opera, Safari, etc) it would have to be browser tab specific. I find when I browse the web I will open 15+ tabs at a time, and often 1 of these tabs has a web page that is playing music or making some type of noise, and it's annoying... I usually try and hunt it down and close it quickly so I can enjoy the rest of the pages in peace.

So... if there is any one else that aggrees that this is a needed browser feature, spread the word, link to Ray's entry, and if you are capible of making an Firefox extension yourself, please do so. And then e-mail me.