To me it doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's a huge annoyance. Basically it stops you dead in your tracks of whatever you were doing and sends you on a frantic hunt for what tab is causing it. The usefulness of a feature that solves problem is (n times p happens * annoyance of p) - at least that's how I prioritize features. So yeah - I've searched several times a year for a plugin that does this, for at least 5 years back.
I wasn't using it to asses the value of the feature in general. I was just curious how often that user ran into the problem that makes it a problem they have been trying to find a fix for since the beginning of tabbed browsing. A tiny annoyance that happens 10 times a day, everyday? A huge annoyance that has happened only twice... but just got him fired from his job? This person made it sound pretty serious to them so I was trying to get a better understanding of what they thought was serious. The issue is so not serious to me that it is not even an issue. Not wanting to sit with just a sample of 1, I thought I'd try to get additional info.
But since you asked... there have been many times when I used my wipers thousands of times each day for several days on end. But we're experiencing a bit of a drought right now so I've not used them in a couple months.
Some people on HN open very many tabs. Like, over one hundred open tabs. So I guess those people find it hard to find the noisy tab.
Also, some things are kind of frustrating, but not frustrating enough to bother spending ages fixing it.
Quite often something will happen and I'll think "there must be a fix. I just don't know the OS enough yet" - and sometimes there is a really easy fix and sometimes there is an ugly 3rd party kludge. While the problem is kind of annoying having a fix just fixes the problem, while searching for a fix teaches me more. (Am I making any sense? Its about the journey not the destination).
I have 25 tabs open at the moment (and I've only had this browser open for 3 hours).
I tend to "open in new tab" and queue things for reading.
Because I tend to open lots of new tabs within a short period, it makes identifying the one that is playing sounds very hard. The worst is the "delayed video player" scenario, especially if it is below the fold. It's incredibly annoying and embarrassing to be desperately trying to find where the noise is coming from if it happens in a boring meeting.
I can get to 50 tabs pretty quickly when researching a problem. Sometimes I'll then trim them and save them as sets to open later. Is really useful for cross referencing and noun hunting.
I've probably got about 60 open across two sessions right now, and this is typical or lower. It's as simple as having a queue of things to get to, plus groups of tabs represented in-progress research on some topic. It's especially useful given tab-sync across devices. It's not a workflow for everyone, but if the benefit of having easy access outweighs the intangible mental cost of a zillion tabs, it can work very well.
I like to open multiple youtube tabs at the same time and then watch videos one by one. Most of them are in flash and I have flash block, so they do not play until I actually click on them.
Some youtube videos are not blocked by flashblock and it is highly annoying when two videos play at the same time.
Some new site use autoplay videos too, and again, I like to open multiple tabs and then close them at the same time. Of course I can figure out which tab is causing it, but it is annoying having to do it. With this feature, I can just kill it.
It happened to me once today with a streaming radio station. Strangely, I had hit the back button, so there was no player visible on the page, yet it began playing after a minute or two of dead air. I couldn't find it for a while (there were no players visible on any of the tabs I had recently opened), and I ended up having to click the tab, then click the "forward" button to go to a page I didn't seem to be on, then click the "pause" button on the player. I was lucky I figured it out, because I have a lot of tabs open. If I'd had an icon on the tab, I would have just closed the tab.
And yesterday, it happened on a news page. The page autoplayed a video, which always bugged me. I looked around the page, found the annoying little video, and stopped it. About twenty minutes later, my laptop suddenly started talking. It took a minute or so to figure out that the page that had autoplayed earlier had a 20 minute refresh cycle, and each refresh restarts the autoplay. Once I identified the tab, I closed it.
So I'd like to see 1) an easier way to identify where the sound is coming from (such as these tab icons) and 2) a "don't autoplay" preference.
I ran into it yesterday. Not even kidding. I had maybe 12 tabs open and one tab started making a pay-attention-to-me notification sound that I didn't recognize, so I had to go through all the tabs looking for what wanted my attention.
In Firefox, the "media.autoplay.enabled" pref can be used to disable the "autoplay" attribute for the <video> element. (But I think it may still be possible for pages to auto-start videos using JavaScript.)
Fortunately, with Adblock Plus and FlashBlock, it's fairly rare.
The most common culprit lately has been YouTube with HTML5 supported videos and autoplay, which I fucking despise. My immediate reaction is to close tabs.
My MO with browsing generally is to queue material up for review later. Crap that demands my attention usually gets it by way of a fist.
Any other domain which commits the same or similar crimes either gets the offending page element removed via Stylebot, or AdBlock's element blocker, or with an /etc/hosts file 0.0.0.0 entry. Life's too fucking short for that shit.
Another use case is that if you start up a music player, a video, or click on an embedded video on Facebook, and then tab away from it. If you didn't pin it, it can be hard to find it again.
